Hybrid workweek is going to devastate traditional nucleus/commuter cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco

Remote Work Is Costing Manhattan More Than $12 Billion a Year

Reporting by Emma Court and Donna Borak Data and Analysis by Linly Lin Graphics by Kyle Ki

New York City is bustling with office workers again, at least on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. It’s a different mood on Fridays and Mondays, when subway cars empty out, Sweetgreen salad lines thin and, come happy hour, there are plenty of seats at the bar. The in-person workweek has shrunk to three days.

Three years into the pandemic, business leaders and city officials around the world are still trying just about everything to lure employees back into offices and revive local economies. But new data on in-person work analyzed by Bloomberg News show that in a number of cities across the US, Fridays at the office are dead. Mondays are a crapshoot. And returning to pre-pandemic work schedules looks like a lost cause.

Nowhere is the economic cost of remote work more pronounced when it comes to spending than in the world’s leading financial center: New York. Manhattan workers are spending at least $12.4 billion less a year due to about 30% fewer days in the office, according to a Bloomberg News analysis using exclusive data from Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom’s WFH Research group. That figure was calculated by multiplying the annual inflation-adjusted loss in spending per worker by the US Census Bureau’s estimated nearly 2.7 million commuters and residents who worked in Manhattan in 2019.

That means the average worker is spending $4,661 less per year on meals, shopping and entertainment near their offices in New York. That compares to $3,040 in San Francisco and $2,387 in Chicago. These behaviors are most entrenched in cities with longer commutes, a higher proportion of white-collar workforces and longer-lasting pandemic restrictions.

Losing $12.4 billion a year translates into missed sales for restaurants, retailers and other businesses that drive New York’s economic engine. Office vacancies pose a multibillion-dollar crisis for America’s biggest office real estate market. The transit system’s finances are in free fall. Chief executives like Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s David Solomon and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon are growing impatient with workers. And the fiscal threat to tax revenue verges on the existential: What is the value of a city when workers don’t need to be there anymore?

“If less income tax is being paid in New York City,” said Comptroller Brad Lander, “then it’s hard to figure out how to capture enough value to maintain the subways and invest in the schools and keep the city safe and clean and all the things that really matter.”

How New York fares is instructive for other financial centers around the world: Only 6% of Londoners previously able to work from home said their employers expect them to be in the office five days a week, according to a report from the mayor’s office. And last year, about 14% of jobs posted in all of Tokyo’s 23 wards were mostly remote, compared with 3% in 2019, according to job site Indeed.

Spending Shift When a city’s commuting base disappears, sales and transit revenue fall, the commercial property tax base shrinks and “labor income shrinks for people who provide goods and services to those workers,” Steven Davis, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, said in a recent panel.

Across the US, spending has grown from 2019, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse, which measures in-store and online retail sales across all forms of payment. But disparities between the days of the week are evident in New York: Overall US spending in October 2022 rose by an average 23% on Fridays, compared with 20% in the Greater New York area and just 11% in Manhattan. The numbers don’t account for inflation.

“Less spending by workers in the central areas means a lot less sales tax revenue,” said Jose Maria Barrero, a professor at Mexico’s Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo and researcher with the WFH group who calculated the figures for Bloomberg. “If you have fewer commuters, that means less revenue.”

These shifts are most visible in Manhattan’s Financial District and Midtown, where trading desks and cubicles lay bare at the start and end of the week. Many restaurants and retailers have closed up shop and foot traffic and subway riders have plummeted.

Bankers, lawyers and other executives who expense black car rides to their New York City offices have also rejiggered their commuting schedules to focus on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, according to data from HQ Corporate Mobility, which works with Fortune 500 companies to book, bill and expense cars.

From June to December 2022, rides taken on Mondays and Fridays reached only around 33% and 38% of pre-pandemic levels, respectively, according to HQ data of about 400,000 rides over the last three years. On Thursdays, that rises to roughly 43%.

“On Fridays, I definitely want to be in the comfort of my own home,” said Nate Diaz, 24, who goes into the financial firm S&P Global on Tuesdays, when he knows his coworkers will be there.

At the office, he heads to lunch with colleagues — spending up to $20 on Chipotle or Chopt — and happy hours on Stone Street.

Diaz saves $100 a week by working from home, though he’ll sometimes grab coffee in his Astoria, Queens, neighborhood. He used the extra cash to buy new bulletin boards and a massage chair for his “souped-up” home office.

“People have changed their lifestyle and their behavior,” said Michelle Meyer, North America chief economist at Mastercard Economics Institute. “If you are working from home that day, you’re not commuting into your office, and going to the bodega next to your office.”

The growth has turned the neighborhoods where hybrid workers live into a new kind of business district. Foot traffic in New York’s four other boroughs recovered by 85% or more by the end of 2022 compared with pre-pandemic levels, according to data from Orbital Insight. Manhattan's recovery rate lags at 78%.

It’s more pronounced among restaurants and bars, where transactions increased by 48% in Brooklyn in the fourth quarter of 2022 from 2019, compared with 18% in Manhattan, according to data tracked by commerce company Square. The two boroughs were growing at the same rate pre-pandemic, according to Square Research Lead Ara Kharazian.

Average retail spending on Mondays in October rose by 28% in the Bronx, 21% in Queens and 18% in Brooklyn, compared with just 2% in Manhattan from the same period in 2019, according to Mastercard data.

Outer-borough growth could be a silver lining for New York, but a recently published plan to revive the city focuses less on the newly vibrant areas and more on inching back to a Manhattan-centric economy.

While Mayor Eric Adams now requires government employees to work in-person five days a week, he’s had less luck pushing business leaders to mandate stricter in-office requirements.

“It’s time,” he said last year. “New York City can’t run from home.”

Existential Risk Worker attendance at New York offices during the fourth quarter of 2022 recovered to about 43% of pre-pandemic levels on average, according to badge-tracking data from Kastle Systems. On Tuesdays, though, that jumps to an average 51% and plunges to 23% on Fridays.

Office attendance has ticked up when employers issue mandates for more in-person days, but they’re not a cure-all and a wide variability in company policies has left many pandemic-era habits in place. For example, Blackstone asked investment professionals to come into the office five days a week, but workday traffic at its headquarters at 345 Park Avenue remains half of its 2019 level. At American Express, which doesn’t have in-office requirements, only 31% of pre-pandemic workday traffic is back at its headquarters at 200 Vesey Street.

At eight major Manhattan office buildings, foot traffic is down about 52% on Fridays and 45% on Mondays compared with pre-Covid, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of Placer.ai data.

Researchers have modeled a 40% drop in office market value as office towers sit partially empty, which they estimate would cost $5 billion in lost tax revenue, or 5% of the city’s annual budget. New York’s future sales tax revenue could also diminish as half-empty office buildings drive sluggish spending. It could also take a hit to its income tax base if employees continue to relocate elsewhere.

“That’s a big hole that will need to be plugged with new taxes, lower spending,” said Columbia University professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, who referred to the situation in a recent panel as a potential “urban doom loop.”

The city is still seeing the impacts on its transit system, where weekday ridership has recovered only 64% on average in January and revenue shortfalls are expected to hit over $2 billion a year through 2026.

With pandemic aid running out, the agency is planning service cuts to about seven lines on Mondays and Fridays, including the 1 train that connects Manhattan and the Bronx, and the L and F trains, which run across Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan.

The change will be felt by working-class New Yorkers, who are back to work five or six days a week. “They can’t afford a $50 Uber,” and aren’t able to work remotely, said MTA Chief Executive Officer Janno Lieber in November.

‘Forget about it’ While New York has a history of overcoming economic shocks like the September 11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 financial crisis, business owners say they are struggling to adapt to the new three-day workweek.

Sam’s Falafel owner Emad Ahmed said foot traffic near Wall Street is the worst it's been in his 30 years of business. Only on a sunny midweek day do sales recover to about 60% of what they were, he said. Meanwhile, the rising cost of gas and ingredients have pressured his business.

“Monday, Friday, forget about it,” said Ahmed, 57, who parks his truck in Zuccotti Park and notches only 30% of his pre-Covid revenue on those days. “You lose money when nobody is here.”

Jordan Cohen, the manager of Bryant Park Grill in Midtown Manhattan, said about 40% fewer diners are now showing up on Mondays and Fridays for the power lunch hub’s $22 chicken Caesar salad and $50 braised lamb shank.

To make up for the lost business, the restaurant has leaned on corporate events on slow weeknights and has clawed back around 90% of pre-pandemic revenue. But even those events get dinged by the hybrid workweek: At parties where employers invite 300 attendees, only about half will show up, Cohen said.

And Sweetgreen, a salad chain ubiquitous with New York City’s fleece-vest set, said the start and end of the week used to be its strongest sales days, but “Mondays and Fridays are definitely not the same,” said Sweetgreen co-founder and CEO Jonathan Neman, on a November earnings call.

On a Monday in October at a Bryant Park Sweetgreen known for lines stretching down the block on busy days, office workers in button-down shirts and high heels breezed in and out with $15 salads in hand.

“That was surprisingly easy,” a woman leaving the salad counter said to her companion.

“Yeah, it doesn’t feel like a madhouse in there, which is weird,” he replied.

Bloomberg found the longest wait for a salad at the Bryant Park Sweetgreen at noon was around 13.5 minutes on a Wednesday. By contrast, it took only four minutes to breeze through the line on a Friday.

Sweetgreen is now renegotiating leases with landlords to structure rent as a percentage of sales, versus a fixed amount common with commercial rents.

With offices emptier on Mondays and Fridays, business travelers are cutting hotel stays short by a day or two and flying in just for midweek, said Vijay Dandapani, president and CEO of the Hotel Association of New York City.

Business travel has rebounded the most in places like Austin, Texas, and Charlotte, North Carolina, where workers are back in physical offices, according to hospitality data and analytics firm STR. In Austin, hotels recovered to 92% of pre-pandemic occupancy on Mondays of last year, while New York hotels were only around 83% recovered, and San Francisco was even further behind, at 74%.

Resistance to coming into the office at the end of the week runs so deep that when a large financial company rented out a Fitzpatrick Hotel Group bar in Midtown Manhattan on a Friday evening, only about a third of the 130 invited employees showed up, said John Fitzpatrick, who owns the company's two New York City hotels.

“To lose that amount of business on a Friday, which is one of your busiest days, is huge,” said Fitzpatrick, who depends on business travelers for 70% of his clientele.

To drum up business, he’s considering raffling a free trip to Ireland to Friday bar customers. Another marketing idea is to encourage tourists to extend their New York City holidays by promoting the hotel as a remote-work haven on Fridays.

“We have to come up with something,” Fitzpatrick said.

I absolutely refuse to feel guilty because I am saving money and eating healthier because I work from home.

Working from home is good for the environment and helps people offset the cost of inflation by eating at home and spending less on commuting daily.

The days I come into the office are my most laid back because I take a lunch break and work a traditional 8 hours only vs my days at home where I sign in early and stay working past 5.

Yes I have noticed that the midweek days are now less productive as people now have to catch up with each other from when they last saw each other.

Whaaaa, poor oligarchs.

The oligarchs will save money in the long run, but people who depend on jobs like restaurant work will suffer.

Hopefully the recession economists say is coming will result in all these lazy employees refusing to come into work getting laid off. It’s already happened to a certain extent with all the tech layoffs.

^ Except people are not refusing to work, you must be envious of people who can work from home because absolutely no one wants to see people laid off for working from home vs the office which is unproductive.

If employers want workers back in the office full time, they should raise our wages to cover the inflated gas, food and wardrobe costs. Money is a a powerful incentive.

R10, your odds of not getting laid off will go up if you start showing your face at the office. When layoffs come, and they will, they’ll come first for the remote workers.

The exact opposite has occurred at my job r13.

I love working from home. I’m never getting back on the 6 train.

Downtown SF bookstore to close as becomes victim of decline in CBD foot traffic

If multiple companies simultaneously decide to begin phasing out hybrid work, well, a little collusion never hurt nobody…

"Money is a a powerful incentive."

R12 = Milton Friedman

[quote] [R12] = Milton Friedman

Who is Milton Friedman? I was quoting Anna Nicole Smith.

Yep, I knew this was coming. What a shame too. I can understand working from home though. What we're witnessing is a total reconstruct of society.

The beginning of the end. America will soon be tossed into the dust bin of history, Sad...

Why then are there so many projects for new mega sized office buildings in NYC. A new huge building next to the Chrysler building. A few more on Park Avenue are going up. Hudson Yards is still expanding. What's going on?

Skyscrapers Under Construction or Planned in New York

[quote] Why then are there so many projects for new mega sized office buildings in NYC. A new huge building next to the Chrysler building. A few more on Park Avenue are going up. Hudson Yards is still expanding. What's going on?

The story being told is that there is still demand for the most desirable office space with all the latest amenities and that some firms are downsizing in terms of square footage but choosing newer, fancier space. I’m not completely buying it.

Also, some of theirs projects were in the works and already financed prior to COVID.

[quote]Also, some of theirs projects were in the works and already financed prior to COVID.

This just in today:

"A new rendering has been revealed for PENN 15, a 56-story commercial supertall at 15 Penn Plaza in Midtown, Manhattan. Designed by Foster + Partners and developed by Vornado Realty Trust, the 1,200-foot-tall skyscraper will yield 2.7 million square feet of office space and stand as the centerpiece of the 7.4-million-square-foot Penn District master plan. Northstar Contracting Group is the demolition contractor for the Hotel Pennsylvania, which is currently being razed to make way for the new tower along Seventh Avenue between West 32nd and 33rd Streets."

We are supposed to care about the coffee shops, delis, restaurants, bars and pharmacies near our jobs that have increased prices by about 25%?

I’m sorry, but I’m not going back to my pre-pandemic spending…because the current prices are bonkers.

Don’t jack up a $10.00 salad to $13.95 because “our profits went down during Covid and we are trying to get that money back.”

The reality is everyone working from home would be a death knell to a city. If you want a vibrant city you need people actually commuting and going into a office. If not you end up with dead downtowns with no businesses and a public transportation system that is bleeding money and will have to start shutting down.

Here's a novel idea - change the empty offices into residential living. Problem solved.

I don't give a FUCK about commercial real estate landlords or residential corporate greed machines for that matter.

I hate when there's this call to 'save' a certain industry, like commercial real estate, just by making other people's lives more miserable.

Economies change. Industries disappear all the time. We can't afford to prop them up - you have to pivot, change or close. Normal individual workers do not receive the support or choices that big business get.

If you are talking about higher wages and more time off, it will help the economy.

[quote]The reality is everyone working from home would be a death knell to a city. If you want a vibrant city you need people actually commuting and going into a office. If not you end up with dead downtowns with no businesses and a public transportation system that is bleeding money and will have to start shutting down.

You need to get out of Manhattan if you think that describes NYC. I live in a fairly ritzy part of Queens (Long Island City), and this is one of the most alive places I've been in a long time. There's so much good stuff that's walkable, including a Michelin-starred restaurant.

R21, I fear you're right. The beginning of the end of America as we've known it. I'm so afraid for my grandchildren.

“The reality is everyone working from home would be a death knell to a city. If you want a vibrant city you need people actually commuting and going into an office. If not you end up with dead downtowns with no businesses and a public transportation system that is bleeding money and will have to start shutting down.”

Then let the cities die, if their life blood is the toil of others.

I work for one of the prominent financial firms. One that everyone wanted to work for pre-crisis and is still considered a very desirable employer. But I only make around $200k. My peers probably make a little more and probably average 10-15 years of experience. I’m not an investment banker or in sales and trading (obviously), but I’m not back office either. There are WAY more employees making these lackluster salaries than most people realize.

For me, it’s a very pleasant lifestyle because I live in Manhattan and have a minimal commute. I’m only responsible for myself. But some of my colleagues are commuting an hour to two hours each way. And the commute isn’t cheap. And they have kids to support.

I think there are a lot of Manhattan employees who seem like they have decent jobs, but actually don’t make enough for a tolerable lifestyle. If you are a couple with two kids who don’t happen to be the same gender, $200k each doesn’t really cut it. 400k annually is only around 20k/month. A three bedroom is going to be $10k. Two tuitions, plus summer camp and after school childcare is going to be another $10k. So no money for food, electric, or internet. So they end up living one to two hours outside of Manhattan. And that sucks.

I realize there are cheaper housing options and you can roll the dice with public schools, but is that preferable to living in Cincinnati? I think there are a lot of people working in Manhattan who just can’t accept what a horrible choice they made. A lot of them are committed and won’t uproot their kids, but I don’t think people in their 20’s are going to make the same mistake.

Maybe these business owners should turn these expensive offices into affordable housing. People can't afford healthcare or rent any longer. Allow small business owners to thrive instead of crushing them. Stop over charging people for everything.

Offices are not easily convertible to residential space. It’s not that it can’t be done, but converting NYC office space to residential would cost a fortune. It’s not found space.

Think about a typical apartment building floor - with five to ten apartment, each with a kitchen and at least one bathroom. And a stairwell and elevator bank that needs to be accessed via a shared hallway. Now compare that to your office layout.

Gotta find a new way to fleece the sheep working from home, overlords.

I think it's a positive thing to spend money closer to home.

Well, now they’re predicting AI is going to take millions of these office jobs so, if that actually happens, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

I can't believe all the queens wanting in office. Misery loves company, I suppose. It is really felt in San Francisco. The downtown area or financial district is dead. Nobody wants to go into the office in the Bay Area and people especially do not want to commute in to the city. Time to turn those office buildings into affordable housing. It's empty and it's not an area that will bother the NIMBY's on the north side. NYC is the financial center of the US. Major businesses will always keep some sort of physical presence. Tech, not so much.

No one thought old factories could be converted until artists and other creatives moved in and created lofts which became so popular that they were turfed out. Same thing can happen with old office buildings.

Converting most modern office buildings into residential housing isn't feasible in most cases, unfortunately. Lots of cities are looking into it, but there are numerous reasons why it won't work.

The big build in midtown Manhattan is a boondoggle and meant to fill the coffers of the present governor and her supporters. She’s very corrupt. I hope they arrest her before she does more harm.

[quote]Converting most modern office buildings into residential housing isn't feasible in most cases, unfortunately. Lots of cities are looking into it, but there are numerous reasons why it won't work.

I mean, if the 100+ y/o Woolworth Building can be partially converted into condos…

This is just one example of why converting commercial spaces into residential housing won’t be so easy.

Ok I read the NYT article. The biggest issue is the floor plan (ie perimeter) of modern skyscrapers is much vaster than buildings of a century earlier. Open floor plan offices mean that (some) light reaches into the depths of the center but if the space is divided into apartments, that center core becomes a problem. The article doesn’t conclude that it’s *impossible* (although there is one stupid illustration that shows a 2 bedroom apt with the two apparently required bathrooms side by side) and the comments have suggestions as well. There are plenty of rooms that don’t require natural light, “media rooms”, home gyms, home offices, STORAGE.

These new conversions will be very expensive but what else is new? It’s not like new purpose built condos are less so. But as one comment points out, people moving into the brand new conversion means their former place is up for grabs and then the new occupants of that space have also created a vacancy and so on. Eventually (and hopefully) affordable places emerge.

LIC ritzy? That made me giggle, and then I threw up a little in my mouth.

I am in NYC

What I am mostly seeing is more senior manager-level people who live in the suburbs only coming in a few days a week.

They have kids they want to see + a house with plenty of room to WHM and a lengthy commute they want to avoid.

Several have told e their towns are far more crowded during the week as people grab coffee, lunch, etc . in the downtown.

R24 R25. Hudson Yards is not still expanding—Related has put a HOLD on any plans for additional towers, or extending the platform over the western portion of the site. Vornado has put a hold on all of its plans for the PennDistrict other than completing the current building update + HP demo…that concept for the area will take many years to happen, if at all.

Suburban office parks have even more jobs that can go telework, full-time in fact. The back office functions and things like inside sales can easily be made telework and often already have. Suburban office space had higher vacancy rates than center cities before COVID. Recently a huge building near 2the junction of 2 freeways in suburban Wahington went for 25% of asking.

Companies need to lay down the law on these layabouts. Tell them their work week is Mon-Fri and if they don't show up the company will consider them resigned and stop paying their salary. If enough companies follow through on this these lazy gits will start showing up for work.

Developers aren’t desperate enough yet. But some day they’ll be renting out those floors as raw space to artists and the cycle will start again.

R50, totally agree!

R50 Not while it’s a job seeker’s market. I’m never going back to commuting full time. A day or two a month in the office? Fine.

The cost of financing any new, large commercial construction will remain prohibitive for a while, due to various exigencies…don’t look for anything tall & new beyond what’s already financed for a while. CRE is cyclical in any economic environment, and this is an ebb in the flow.

R53, with layoffs in tech announced almost every month, I’m not sure it’s really a job seeker’s market anymore.

R55 I guess it depends on your field.

R50: “Companies need to lay down the law on these layabouts. Tell them their work week is Mon-Fri and if they don't show up the company will consider them resigned and stop paying their salary. If enough companies follow through on this these lazy gits will start showing up for work.”

R50 is a bottom whore who has used up NYC’s limited bucket of in-town tops. Her whoredom can only be met with a regular supply of “bi-curious” suburban daddies coming into the city for work.

Sorry, but your lack of tops for your gaping mussy is not my reason for coming into work.

R57 is a pathetic pea-brained nitwit with no work ethic with most likely the attention span of a gnat.

R56, most of the remote jobs have been in tech, and most of the job lay-offs we have seen have been in tech, so I don’t think tech workers are in a position to make demands anymore. It’s not 2021.

[quote] Here's a novel idea - change the empty offices into residential living. Problem solved.

I have a better idea. Let the handwringing legislators propose short-term tax-free housing subsidies for workers who resume 5 days a week in the office. This requires a cultural shift. It took only three years to get everyone committed to remote work. It will take that much time to get everyone back into the office.

[quote]LIC ritzy? That made me giggle, and then I threw up a little in my mouth.

Enjoy your HK shoebox. I’ll stay here in my luxury building with a great view of the ESB.

[quote]Companies need to lay down the law on these layabouts. Tell them their work week is Mon-Fri and if they don't show up the company will consider them resigned and stop paying their salary. If enough companies follow through on this these lazy gits will start showing up for work.

When did we get so many corporate lickspittles here?

See, things like this is why I never believe the "COVID was released on purpose" theory: having to work from home and other ways the "economy as usual" had to stop and be adjusted for a time, and DID without the world ending, really exposed the grift.

Threads like this are a fascinating example of how old and crotchety DL has become. Can y'all hear the powerlessness and bitterness you're projecting as the world moves on?

There are literally tens of thousands of Manhattan apartments with picture-perfect views of the ESB—you don’t need to live in an outer borough for that. Heh.

I am way closer to Midtown where I’m at than I would be for a comparably sized two-bedroom at the same price in Manhattan. I’d have to be looking at new construction in Harlem for that.

[quote]It took only three years to get everyone committed to remote work. It will take that much time to get everyone back into the office.

It took me all of 1 day to become committed to remote work. My bosses took a couple of months, but then became the same. They renegotiated their lease to a much smaller space that is used on an ad-hoc basis by the few that feel they need it.

You WFH fucks are going to drive businesses into the ground, without a doubt. Any managers/owners standing by this bullshit at this point will get what you deserve.

They will move to where the business is R9. They will evolve.

You sound like an old cunt R67. Adapt.

My image of R67 is Homer Simpson's Dad, shaking his withered fist at the sky.

It's you who has to adapt, R69. Get off your fat ass and get back to the office, where' your productivity and effectiveness can be measured. I'm tired of the on-going shitshow WFH has yielded.

Cities are crashing and burning because of WFH. Crime is spiraling, companies are bailing.

Yes same R70.

He's doing it again at R71! lol

Yeah, your ass is def fused to the sofa, R73. Who would think a jumbo BarcaLounger could be a weapon of protest?

Chicago vastly overbuilt in the West Loop over the last decade, and also renovated the old Post Office building. They have far more office space than they'd ever come close to filling.

There's going to be a serious crash there at some point.

It's a shame it can't be organized somehow, the remote stuff. There's a part of me that says, it would be awesome for road traffic and the like if they could not have every single person on the road at the same time every day.

For those of us not familiar with NYC what is ESB? The East Side Bridge? I've never heard of that.

Cities are run overwhelmingly liberal morons who have let the criminals run the show, the streets , the subways etc . It has eroded any desire to commute into the city unless necessary.

I loved NYC beyond any other place and miss being able to spend time in the great restaurants, plays , parks , museums etc .

ESB = Empire State Building

I know several businesses in Midtown Manhattan that survived the pandemic shutdown and ended up closing in recent months due to significant drop in customers. This is the result of too many company employees working mostly from home.

Or an outdated business model.

[bold]Surprise![/bold] Time marches on. Things change.

Businesses and people and institutions who survive are the ones who change and adapt to the new direction society takes.

Those who don't or refuse to - well... they just don't survive.

These are simple facts.

As downtowns suffer, neighborhoods where people live benefit. It’s the same in my small city. I work in the office Monday-Wednesday. It’s saved me travel and clothing costs, and has also reduced what I spend eating out. I’ve had fewer colds/flus because of reduced exposure to coworkers with diseased children. I don’t have to go it as often in icy weather, which reduces my chances of having to use insurance in a collision. And my productivity has increased.

Now, if I want to get something for lunch, I order in from a local place, which I would have never done before. That helps out my local area business people. We heard all the same cries from developers who own commercial property and restaurant owners, etc. - they’re losing money. But then maybe that means they need to shift with the new model, not have people shift back to the model they want.

I'm exactly the same as you R82. My local area is thriving and many new shops, good cafes and restaurants have sprung up and they are always busy.

R27 - downtown/business sections of cities may be dead, but in many places, (at least in the Bay Area) the neighborhoods are bustling with life and activity, and this includes coffee shops, cafes, restaurants, bars, retail, etc. Fuck the corporations. WFH is becoming anchored as the status quo employment model, and this will only spread nationwide as the younger generations become the major percentage of the work force. The idiot execs can keep resisting all they want, but the emerging generations will not play ball. Every day you see headlines about layoffs especially in tech, but this news is manipulative and misleading because there are still a lot of jobs for those people. Think of all the different aspects that need tech workers these days: mobile and telecom, cable and satellite, app developers - essentially anything digital or that needs wireless capability The reality is all companies now need a tech/IT department, and companies that offer products that need software developers, coders, etc. These types of companies are rapidly proliferating and need employees. This is similar to how all companies need to have some kind of accounting dept or legal counsel. If companies stubbornly cling to outmoded ways of doing things, they have no one to blame but themselves as they hemorrhage workers to those who are keeping up with the times.

Glad I don't live in R71's world, which must not have many mature adults.

SF subway expansion already seeing ridership decline

R71 is very, very old and from a different era which no longer exists R85. He doesn't understand the present or future. He's terrified and doesn't want anything to change from when he last actually worked in the 1980s. Either that or he's a property developer who is staring at bankruptcy. Also a MAGA judging from the posts. Sad.

It was never written in stone that there are 5 working days followed by a 2 day weekend. It’s also not a commandment that 5 days must be spent commuting and spending an entire day in an office building. Life is short and if the new paradigm improves quality of life for millions of people it’s worth trying.

Why can't they use the empty office buildings to store grain like the Egyptians did with the pyramids?

If you need money, which most of us do, you’ll do whatever your employer wants. Right now employers want employees back at work to get productivity back up, so workers will return. It’s really that simple.

Also, who has prescribed that each work day needs to be 8 hours. WFH has shown me that I can do 8 hours worth of work spread across a day in 4 hours of quiet, focused concentration. There are so many distractions in the office, too much chatter, too much gossip. I love working from home and am hoping to try travel working in August. Fuck corporations!

Productivity has risen in the past couple of years with WFH R90... Employees are happier, more engaged, doing more, getting better results for their employers and they are also more loyal.

Where they aren't loyal is to the employers who force them to come to the office 5 days a week. They just leave that employer and go to a better, more up-to-date employer. It's really that simple.

Our employer decided to reduce the size of the office, we are welcome 2 days a week, but not more, we can't technically all come at the same time, there isn't enough room for everybody.

I am wondering how employers will start rolling out the "Sorry, no raises this year -- but look what you're saving by not paying for gas and the quality time you've gained by being at home!"

I work in a library and since we've reopened fully in June 2020 we have to go in every day. It's a great career and a rewarding profession but I wouldn't mind a day or two at home.

^^fully reopened in June 2020, we have. . .^^

Law firm librarian here. One plus to the attorneys in my case is if someone needs something after hours or on the weekend I’ll get online and happily do it do from home, since the computer is set up and a few steps away. I used to have them wait until Monday in most cases, since I didn’t have all the databases and systems we use at home. I know this wouldn’t be the case for others and could be really intrusive on their personal time, but I’m on salary and don’t mind.

All the old geezers here squealing about WFH sounds like the people who were pissed off when new-fangled automobiles passed their horse-drawn carriages. And I’m 60.

This is also ironic as it is the mirror reflection of years ago when rural kids were fleeing to the city for jobs.

[quote]All the old geezers here squealing about WFH

Watch it youngster. I am an old geezer here extolling the benefits of WFH for both employee and employer.

R98 - I said I am 60 in the post.

R90 Again, it depends on your field and how valuable you are to the company. Or rather, how valuable the service you provide is, as the leadership doesn’t care about you as a person.

Agree with everyone who says things are changing and for the better. Working from home these past three years has greatly enhanced my life abd made me a better worker. For those of us who have deadlines to produce work product, no, we do not have to be IN the office for our productivity to be measured.

Maybe those resisting WFH are middle managers who may find themselves obsolete.

I agree NYC is better (safer, etc) with throngs of commuters but I will no longer be one.

R100, it is not about you and what makes your life better. It’s about what your employer wants. I once had a job standing on my feet all day. I would have preferred to sit down, but my employer needed me to be on my feet at all times in order to do the job. It wasn’t about my comfort; it was about my employer making money. If I had a problem with it, I was free to leave anytime; however, since I needed money, I stayed. If your employer is fine with you working from home, great, but a lot of employers are not, and ultimately they call the shots if you want to continue being employed. It’s that simple.

Good.

My company also changed their policy in which all workers are expected to come to the office 3 days a week. They can work from home the other 2 days. Some people didn't like this because they got used to the convenience of working remotely for two years, not having to commute and pay for train, bus, gas. Also, if they have children, they won't need day care or baby sitter. But it's unrealistic to have this set-up in most cases. Most people work more efficiently at the office and they are better able to network in person rather than on Zoom meetings. I think a hybrid schedule is a pretty good approach to this challenge.

R101 I get it; you did not have leverage. Some people do.

Employers wanting to hire the best are offering remote work.

It’s THAT simple!

[quote]Most people work more efficiently at the office and they are better able to network in person rather than on Zoom meetings.

Nonsense.

I am much, much more productive working from home. My boss holds ad-hoc Teams meetings as needed without any problems.

It's the rents, Stupid. If workers could more afford to live in Manhattan, they would, and would go into the offices in person. But some of the commutes from even Queens are as long as if not longer than my bus ride from Pennsylvania.

Or at least seemed that way to me a while ago.

I can see this happenstance being a major factor in the securing of a casino for Times Square. Hotels, restaurants, tourist sites, and the accompanying spending.

It's all about the Benjamins, baby.

All the corporations moaning publicly about climate change and their goals to be carbon neutral and save Earth -- all the slide decks, the PR outreaches, the internal memos -- and when the rubber meets the road, they reveal themselves to be the lying cunts they are.

Any business that gives the tiniest bit of a shit about the Earth would rejoice at having people WFH. No wear and tear on infrastructure. No smog from the commute. No heating and cooling cavernous spaces. Hell, no jamming people together to spread germs.

If anyone was ever dumb enough to believe that companies want to be stewards of the Earth instead of grabbers of cash, this should disabuse them of that naïve notion.

But there's also the issue of less commerce for the businesses in the areas where companies are located. Eateries, retails stores are reliant on customers that are workers coming to the office. Now independent businesses have less revenue to pay, expenses and make a profit. People are working from hone and buying much of their shit from Amazon and Fresh Direct instead of physical stores.

I hate the oversaturation of stories about the death of cities. But this is one area that is concerning to me. The WFH shift is dramatic and even if some greater office time occurs, it does seem logical that there is a dramatic decrease in commuters and more importantly, revenue. I worry about my city and the “doom loop” of reducing city revenue forcing cuts to services AND increased taxes on the working stiffs. I’m never moving to Florida but I do worry about the effect this has on city finances and services.

R104, but not everybody is the best, yet everyone seems to think they are. Maybe you’re the best, and your employer is willing to kiss your butt to make your life more comfortable, but that is not true for most workers. And as far as companies wanting the best, I’m not so sure that is true. In my experience, I find that companies just want workers who will do the job as cheaply as possible while creating minimal problems for the employer. That’s why companies don’t hesitate to lay off native-born workers and hire people from overseas, who will work for less money. Are a lot of those foreign workers, many of whom barely speak English, really the best?

R110, there are entities like commercial real estate companies and governments who have PR agencies pitch article ideas to reporters. That and copy/paste "journalism" probably explains what's going on with all of these articles showing up.

[quote]You WFH fucks are going to drive businesses into the ground, without a doubt.

I still go out to eat for lunch, but now at least I'm supporting the businesses close to where I live. This helps local businesses and improves my suburban community. New York, Chicago and San Francisco are already hellscapes and there's nothing that is going to reverse that. Just board them up and let their remaining residents go feral.

I work for a small nonprofit in DC that always had a strict "no telework" policy.

During the lockdown, most of us found we were more productive and satisfied than ever, with more time to focus and work and fewer unnecessary meetings and no office drama.

A few people surfaced as lazy, which was surprising. They also were big complainers and all ended up getting new jobs and leaving, interestingly. But they created a union before quitting.

We had to return to the office full-time in August of 2021. After lots of protests, we were allowed one day of telework per week. (I have come to be fully dependent on this day to focus and get most of my actual non-meeting work done.)

The union petitioned for more WFH days. The CEO said absolutely not. He blamed the board chair, who is conservative and from the midwest. The board chair called us all together for an online meeting and dictated that we may not work from home more than one day per week, period, no questions, and then he thanked us for our hard work and left the meeting. Many of us felt certain the CEO asked the board chair to take the blame for the decision since the CEO always has been adamantly opposed to working from home.

That board chair now is gone and our current one is liberal. The union is pushing for more WFH days and the CEO is stonewalling them. We have had several job finalists who thought they'd be able to negotiate for more WFH days bail out because of the strict policy.

The CEO doesn't care.

He has claimed that we have a high-rent office and need to make use of it. He is now looking at moving us to a higher-rent office space.

Lately he has been citing the need to support area restaurants as one of the reasons we must work in the office. Our community responsibility!

In reality, he's just a butts-in-seats boss and it's been really poor for morale for everyone to realize that we are one of those nonprofits that exists to fulfill the ego of the boss and not to actually be productive. He wants to be able to wander around and inspect, invade, chatter at will whenever he likes, to call a person at 4:50 on their desk phone to make sure they are tethered to the iron stake in the yard. It's depressing to everyone involved.

Several young people have quit, too, because of it—because highly paid five executives in the office get free parking (over $20/day in our building's garage), while poorly paid younger people have had to go back to paying for public transport or parking plus tips and gas, plus the average two hours a day to commute to work and back, and all for the purposes of...more meetings and less work getting done, and therefore more anxiety.

[quote] I worry about my city and the “doom loop” of reducing city revenue forcing cuts to services AND increased taxes on the working stiffs.

It will be interesting to see if progressive Brandon Johnson becomes mayor of Chicago and gets the $2 billion in extra taxes he wants to levy. It will be a great experiment to see what that amount of new taxes will do to a city already in decline. The delicious thing will be that the people of the city will get the government they deserve, although not the government they need.

Your office sounds like a total shitshow and your CEO seems like a control freak stuck in the 90's with a looming expiration date. I'd run from any company that calls it "telework".

R116 Agree with your assessment generally.

The term 'telework' applies, though, according to the definition on this linked page.

Two distinctions between telework and remote work are that teleworkers usually have to spend some time in the office, and that they usually live within commuting distance to the office. My employer has a formal policy of not hiring any full-time staff who live too far to commute to the office.

That’s all true about hospitality. To save money I packed lunch and coffee for a full year and saved about $3000.

r90, look around you. See all those homeless people in their tents? Or the numerous people living out of their cars? Capitalism has failed. When human beings can no longer afford life's necessities (food, shelter, clothing) then that is an indication that it has failed. People have woken up to the grift of this existence which is this that those of us who are just barely getting by by working full time and maybe even sometimes on the side, we have no hope anymore. We know we will never make enough to save for retirement and that our lives are literally, clocking in and clocking out and for what? To reach the end of our lives and realize we are just cogs in the wheel and we give our lives and our precious and limited time to making others rich.

The vast majority of us look around at the homeless and realize that could be us with the next layoff, the next rent increase, the next cancer diagnosis, the next car accident. The fact is, human beings lived for thousands of years without this thing called money but they always had food, shelter and clothing and paid nothing for it as they lived together in tribes. This idea that money is the thing we are all working to attain just to have those basic items is ridiculous. I think most of us just give up at some point, so yeah, working from home is a significant shift in the way society is changing. The pandemic woke people up to what is really important again...family, friends, TIME. So excuse me if I don't feel badly for for not working the way I used to and being able to work from my home. I feel like my life has a bit of meaning again. Those of you wanting us all to return to how things were are still sleeping and I feel really bad for you.

Yeah, for many years, I went out every day to get lunch with work friends and I packed on the calories and pounds, and one day I realized I was spending $10-$15 per day on takeaway foods, and a lot more when we went to an actual restaurant. That's $200-$300 per month on lunches that were always more excessive than what I wanted to eat in the first place, and it left me feeling gross much of the time. Even a 'healthy' salad is many hundreds more calories than I need in one meal.

And then I realized how much plastic waste is involved in daily lunches. Good God.

And then I thought about how unhealthful restaurant food is in general.

And then I stopped doing it except on rare occasions. What a waste of money and resources.

So if I worked from home every day, it would have little to no impact on area restaurants and, as we saw during the lockdown, it would be a tremendous benefit to the environment.

Please, won’t someone think of the landlords?

-DL corporate bootlicks

More companies are requiring employees to return to work. I’m starting to think this whole remote work thing for most people will soon be remembered as a fad from the early 2020’s. It will be like that period during World War 2 when women played professional baseball and went to work building tanks and airplanes and naval ships. It lasted only a few years.

Change is inevitable. It's silly to commute to an office unless it is essential to the business. Some of us chose careers that allow us to work from home. If you want to work from home like us, get trained in an area that allows that. But don't be bitter and begrudge others. It's not a good look.

R122 Have you met Gen Z yet?

If Baby Boomer and older Gen X exes have their ways, then the working-from-home movement will be squashed and will turn out just to have been an anomalous blip. They are certainly trying to kill it.

It's really interesting to me because it reveals a lot about what motivates and interests these executives. In most cases, it is not productivity, efficiency or meeting operational goals, which in many cases working from home improves.

Their drive to bring people back stem in great part from the worst qualities of a boss, and these are the most pervasive qualities of a CEO: Distrust in their staffs, a need to lord over people physically and have them available on demand, an interest in meetings and more meetings to fill their time because unlike worker-bee staff, these executives have very little to do with their time without people around to criticize and control.

And it's comical that the bosses described above claim they need people to return to their offices to support local economies. They don't care at all about shop owners and retail workers—are you kidding me? They're just grasping for excuses to hold court in person because their livelihoods depend on a traditional face-to-face intimidating hierarchy and controlling other people's time and abilities to interact under close watch.

I have never worked for any CEO who had any respect whatsoever for service workers. I don't think many such top executives exist.

R124, Gen Z is just like everyone else. They like to eat and have a roof over their head, and they love to take exotic vacations, so if their ability to make money to be able to do those things is threatened by a layoff because they’re not showing up for work, they’ll quickly change course and do whatever their employer wants. Whether we like it or not, the bosses control everything. What else is new?

Hey R125, I am Gen X and I and every other Gen X person I know loves, loves, loves remote work. I don't personally know anyone of any generation that likes going into the office, except tippity-top execs. At my company the CEO started bitching about remote working even though he rarely comes in himself. Whenever we know he is going to be at a certain location, we all come in to give him the appearance of a full office. Then we all go back home.

R128 I am Gen X, too. My CEO also is Gen X, but older, and he exemplifies every worst stereotype of Baby Boomers. He is 100% against allowing staff to work from home and he has a latent hostility about it. He says he can't trust that people are working if he can't see them. He suggests he may start using keyboard trackers to make sure people aren't "goofing off." But then he says "but I can already see who is and who isn't signed into Outlook, so I probably won't go there." He's draconian in the office and then occasionally declares that we will have a happy hour and when we gather he gives an unconvincing speech about how much he appreciates everyone's hard work. His worldview is centered squarely between Mad Men and 1984 corporate America.

We’re in the office three days a week - Tues, Wed, and Thu. When we first came back last year we had to be there three days and only Tues was mandatory. It got chaotic keeping tracking of who was in when (we’re about 80 people) so they changed it to get everyone there the same three days. Everyone sucks it up during the week but you can see how much happier people are when they are at home.

Sure, some things will change. Cities will have to adapt to changing work habits. That said, if the workers already live in the city, their money will just be directed towards restaurants nearer their homes It’s the same if you live in the suburbs.

Companies themselves are saving money because they are trying to give up their expensive office space leases. So it’s not just the workers pushing the work from home stuff.

We have to all go in twice a week. One day is a core day with everyone in the office and the second day we get to choose.

The core day is great because it starts the week and everyone can be social.

Sometimes when I’m in the office, I’m one of a handful of people there. We all use zoom for meetings.

What’s the point of demanding that we go to the office yet use the same tech as if I’m at home??

There’s a major reset going on. We’re still trying to figure out how it’s all going to settle down.

Considering we have the tech to work remotely, I cannot believe we’ll all end up going to work the office full time ever again. We’ve learned what a waste to time and money the commute is.

[Quote] Cities are run overwhelmingly liberal morons who have let the criminals run the show, the streets , the subways etc . It has eroded any desire to commute into the city unless necessary.

Yeah, sure. Whatever

[Quote] Cities are crashing and burning because of WFH. Crime is spiraling, companies are bailing.

Russian cities, right?

With the upcoming recession, remote workers will be the first to get laid off.

[Quote] with layoffs in tech announced almost every month, I’m not sure it’s really a job seeker’s market anymore.

Tech seems to be the only sector this is happening in

R138, yes, and tech is where most of the remote is still happening, so you do the math.

Smaller companies are happy to give up their rented offices. They’re not demanding workers come in daily.

It’s the huge companies that own space or paid millions to renovate huge space that demand workers come in. It’s not about productivity; it’s about justifying the payment on the soaces

Oh no!! The economy is shifting!! We just MUST go back to exactly the way things were!!!

I had a friend who was working remotely. He vowed he would never return to working in person. He got laid off. He now works in an office.

Commercial real estate was a racket before COVID. I live in a city where corporations were moving here right and left and we still had tons of empty CRE at the height of influx. Everywhere you looked new buildings were going up with nary a signed client while existing buildings were vacant to half full. How did such large ventures receive approval without guarantee of occupancy? These developers and city officials were making money hand over fist and now they want to cry because the rest of us don't want to subsidize their grift? Too late, we all see behind the curtain now.

[quote] Whether we like it or not, the bosses control everything. What else is new?

Actually R127 out in the real world, at least regarding remote work, this is not true. Lots of people in my field (building design) have either quit and found new jobs or made it very clear to their employers that they will quit if full office hours are enforced. In my industry at the moment it’s very difficult to find staff so employers are backing down.

And not just as regards remote work, at my office we threatened something similar and got our yearly vacation time increased by 50%. I think you have a sub thing going on by how you type though so maybe you’re just trolling.

I knew an office worker and then he died R142

CRE is strange

In the 80s boom they overbuilt so much that some cities like Dallas, Houston, San Francisco and downtown Los Angeles didn’t add new commercial skyscrapers for decades

Lolololol R142

[quote] I had a friend who was working remotely. He vowed he would never return to working in person. He got laid off. He now works in an office.

I love to see people get their comeuppance.

The Wokesters and hard Left created the mess that is the large American city and now they're fighting like hell to stay away from these cities by leveraging the shit out of WFH and by trying jobjump their way to a Goldilocks spot.

to job-jump*

Refusing to accept a hybrid working situation and later having to work in person only is like the Aesop's fable of the dog with the bone in his mouth that saw his reflection in the water and tried to get that bone too, and ended up losing both. If you have a hybrid working situation, consider yourself lucky and stop complaining.

Ex-Chicagoan and ex-New Yorker here. I say let 'em die. They were never liveable anyway. This great transformation will be wonderful. People can eat and shop in their communities now instead of being forced to pay more for the slop that's served downtown for lunch.

I'm always the most concerned about the livelihood of the workers in businesses that fail. Many are close to living paycheck to paycheck and often times they can't find a comparable job right away.

This thread reminds me why leaving America was worth the pay cut.

[quote]The Wokesters and hard Left created the mess that is the large American city and now they're fighting like hell to stay away from these cities by leveraging the shit out of WFH and by trying jobjump their way to a Goldilocks spot.

What a load of horseshit R149. Imagine saying something like that without laughing... You're clinically insane.

Since this ultimately is a matter of profound importance for the country, the NSA ought to survey internet providers to find out what WFHers are really doing when they're on the clock. Just raw data and no targeting of individuals or specific companies. I wonder what that pie chart would look like? Heavily weighted to streaming services? Social Media? Porn? DL?

I liked working from home! It was a pleasure. I still had to deal with office BS but it wasn’t right in my face.

My idiot boss still wants to cram everyone next to each other in an open office set-up. We had a Covid outbreak a few months ago that can be tracked to that.

r156, if the employee is making their deadlines/production goals or whatever, it matters not what they are doing every second of every day. Jesus, you control freaks are annoying as fuck. You just hate not having that kind of control over people anymore and you might want to rethink why you believe you're entitled to micromanaging like that. It speaks to some really deep issues.

R123 said it perfectly.

R125 nailed it as far as my job in NYC. Awful, dumb frau VP who enjoys bullying people in person. Corporate NYC is full of vicious cunts like this, white and black, all striving to be a caricature of the “tough female boss.”

We have a mandatory four days per week in the office, no exceptions.

I have frequent Zoom meetings with colleagues at peer organizations, and 95 percent of them are at home during those meetings, including people who work in impressive-looking offices a block from the White House that no doubt were chosen because of their important physical location. My office is four blocks from the White House, and one of the reasons our CEO insists we must be in the office is because of how much we pay to be located where we are. Yet, all the people who we used to meet with face to face at one office or the other, we now meet with virtually on Zoom or Teams and they are almost always comfortably working from home. I'd say about 10 percent of the time I meet with these people, one of them will say, "Are you in THE OFFICE? Oh, wow!"

I moved across the country and have it in writing that my I am 100% permanent remote status. So is my boss and 90% of my team. No one wants to live in California anymore. Sorry but I would quit any job in a nanosecond that made me come in. I've saved so I have plenty of "fuck you money".

Finally an honest reason (R160) for clinging to WFH and one I can get behind. Getting the fuck away from women. And women bosses? I'd rather work from my car sitting in a parking lot outside the building.

GOOD!

What makes you think those women want to work with YOU, R163?

I mean, you know how bitchy fags can be.

R163 The struggle is real!

They get off on bullying and bossing people around.

I go to the office twice a week. It’s perfect for me, mainly to get out of the house.

There is no longer any purpose to go in 5 days a week.

My neighbor makes complete sense when she says the shift to working from home has finally allowed her to be a good worker and a good parent. The daily commute would take two hours of her life that she can’t spend with her family.

American industry never figured out the childcare problem.

By keeping salaries low and downgrading benefits, it forced the spouse to enter the workforce. But child care hasn’t caught up—it’s rare and painfully expensive. Women, who still do the bulk of child care, constantly feel trapped because they have two jobs—corporate and home—and little help.

Working from home has helped tremendously

Women should be working, not taking care of their children during work hours. Just kidding, I don't give a fuck what they do. Another pro to WFH - not seeing your female colleagues constantly leave the office early to deal with their kids and picking up the slack because I am single without kids. WFH truly is the best and I agree with the posters upthread, women bosses are the absolute worst. Even women hate women bosses.

Do you speak for all women, R170? Please mansplain it to me then, because I am a woman who has had women bosses I liked.

I’ve had two female bosses and they were both terrible. They both adhered so hard to company rules, never allowing for any flexibility at all.

Make bosses seem so much more empathetic to the reality of life. One of my male colleagues had a kid but our company had no paternity leave at the time. He left for a month to take care of the kid and took his annual leave to do so. Only decades later did my colleague tell me secretly that our male boss at the time gave him back all his annual leave time afterwards. He understood the importance of family and necessity to take care of newborns.

No female boss would ever have done that.

So we’ve all been working hybrid from at least a year now. NYC doesn’t seem particularly Devastated

R172 That's the opposite of my experiences:

Female VP, immediate supervisor: Scattered, erratic, smart, patient, careful, a mentor.

Male CEO, her supervisor: Domineering, belittling, insulting, fully manic at times, entitled, periods of laziness, grandiose, unreasonable, expected sympathy

Next job:

Male COO, immediate supervisor: Spacey, confused, unfocused, patient as a manager, anxious, insecure, fired after one year by....

Male CEO, became my new immediate supervisor: Confident, articulate, eccentric, intellectual, supportive, 'accidentally racist' (as coworkers called him), unintentionally offensive, VERY lazy (sometimes stared out of windows for hours and then moseyed around interrupting people because he had nothing to do), deeply flawed but nice guy who mostly let people self-manage but who also was too loyal to damaging people, including someone who stole money...

Male CEO, who took the place of CEO above when he retired: Chaotic, incapable of clear communication, openly vindicitve, proudly manipulative, entirely ungrateful, threatening, bigoted against certain groups, smart, not cruel but not at all supportive, very, very stuck in a personal victim mindset, believes he is overburdened, undercompensated, and disrespected

Female VP, current supervisor: insanely credentialed and accomplished, driven, incisive, analytical, patient, problem solver, supportive, kind, generous, teaches yoga and meditates, fluent in five languages, MBA and PH.D., mother of two kids (HS & MS), nicest and most effective boss I have ever had. My only criticism is I feel she is overly collaborative, encouraging her entire team of eight to collaborate on every document and literally taking up more than one full week of my working time per month with meetings. That is maddening. I don't have a single other criticism of her as a person or how she works.

I have loved my female bosses too.

My male manager harassed my female supervisor to cut her "vacation" short because he didn't have any one to fill in (except him). She had all the PTO and FMLA to cover the week and it was for a scheduled c section.

Sooner or later

You BATHE I success!

And your minions salute

They say nothing but "YES"!

But your power is empty

It fades like the mist

Once you've been kissed...

Job hopper here. I've probably had 30+ jobs of varying duration. I'd say women bosses have been both my favorite and my least favorite. At the "favorite" end of the scale was a woman boss who actually had a management degree. She was my boss when my mom was dying of cancer, so I was lucky.

On the other end of the women boss scale were a couple of micro-managers. One of them actually went through my trash can and confronted me with some document that I had thrown away.

All my micromanagers have been women.

Horrible bosses

This is been a very interesting thread to read. I think that we should all walk away with the philosophy. That flexibility is key, and that change is inevitable.

As for all that empty commercial space, why not just let the homeless pitch their tents in these buildings. Given the poor occupancy, the buildings aren’t worth much anyway. They will be grateful for the protection from the elements. I’m partially joking, but seriously you don’t have to worry about the perimeter of the building or the ridiculous stuff in that one article. Most of those so-called architects attendedvery poor programs.

For me, one of the benefits of the work from home movement was the ability to control my diet and add extra exercise into my day. All of this was possible because of no commute. I’m healthier than I was before the pandemic, 45 pounds lighter, eating better, and frankly feeling great.

R180 I walk to work, thank God, about 1.5 miles a day.

But I walked SO MUCH during the lockdown and I ate SO MUCH more healthfully and lost about 20 pounds. We got called back to the office and I gained it all back.

Just last week, we had a birthday cake and people brought in junk food two other days. It's hard to resist when the junk is always there. I have been skipping lunch for the past three months just to maintain my weight because we always have SURPRISE!!! IT'S SOMEONE'S BIRTHDAY! mandatory junk food fests. I resent it so much.

[quote]But I walked SO MUCH during the lockdown and I ate SO MUCH more healthfully and lost about 20 pounds. We got called back to the office and I gained it all back.

That's 100% your lack of will power. People who overeat always blame something other than themselves.

Do you pull the wings off flies too r182?

R179 Empty buildings with squatting homeless junkies is the worst thing you can do. Why not demolish the uglier office buildings and create more parks in midtown? Blow up that awful KAWS shit while you’re at it.

But that can’t work in NYC. The parks would be full of litter, needles, homeless shit and homeless in one day.

In a civilized city like Seoul, it could work.

Someone has to pay for the buildings' upkeep--infrastructure maintenance for safety, climate control, fixing broken windows, drywall, etc. Those costs are covered by tenants' rents/leases. How do you suggest the property owners would cover costs with homeless people, many of them mentally ill and likely to intentionally or accidentally (urinating, defecating, etc.) damage the property?