This Is Fine

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Wipqozn

12:40

Everyone’s over remote work except for the workers themselves fortune.com/2022/08/09/ceos-say-remote-work-hurting-businesses

> To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., the mid-century media mogul behind the conservative National Review, many CEOs are standing athwart the remote work era, yelling for it to stop. Especially the ones whose business relies on foot traffic in core urban centers.

> As of July 14, transactions at Pret locations in business districts were 20% below their pre-pandemic rates; suburban locations were up 120%. Stanford economist and WFH Research founder Nick Bloom summed it up: “WFH office workers are lunching from home in the suburbs, cutting city center spending and boosting suburban spending.”

Oh no! heaven forbid!

> It’s not just the fast-casual space, as Bloomberg reports. Net sales decreased 5% during the fourth quarter at early-pandemic beneficiary Clorox’s health and wellness division, which it said is due to several factors, including normalizing demand for cleaning products as well as low office occupancy rates and a tight labor market for cleaning professionals.

> “It is actually an epidemic in our industry,” he fumed. “This all happened because people learned to get easy money from working out of their homes, and fewer people now want to come and do the jobs that they were doing.”

jfc, "easy money"

Maybe you should pay more?

> New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been a notable voice of opposition to remote work among local politicians, repeatedly saying that remote work is draining the city’s economy.

> “It’s time to get back to work,” Adams said in February. “You can’t stay home in your pajamas all day—that’s not who we are as a city. You need to be out, cross-pollinating ideas, interacting with humans.”

> Even the president has weighed in; during his State of the Union address in March, Joe Biden said that “it’s time for Americans to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again.” For Garutti, that ideally means getting in line at Shake Shack.

Maybe, just maybe, if cities like New York were actually bloody affordable, this wouldn't be a problem? You know, if people coul actually afford to live where they work?

I do like how this article ends with them linking to multiple articles that remote work is a net positive.

4 hours later…

BradC