They need us. They need us buying the cars. They need us lined up in the drive thru. They need us to drive past the ads. To swing by the store after work.
The technology is for them. The revolution is for them. The freedom is for them. The leisure is for them. To stroll through the store on Tuesday morning.
We’re the resource. They’re the consumers.
It’s this. I work in commercial real estate. If a “goes dark” (stops doing business at the location), property owners can have loan obligations such as as cash management (the bank receives tenant rent checks directly instead of the person who owns the property). This happens even if the tenant is still paying rent because if office in the strip mall closes, no one goes to the restaurants and in turn they can’t pay rent either.
Personally, I disagree with this. This feels like we are forcibly propping up this system instead of letting it evolve naturally. I think we should let those corporate zones die and move restaurants and shopping closer to residential areas.
This feels like we are forcibly propping up this system instead of letting it evolve naturally.
Crony-capitalism in a nutshell.
Literally, this is the inevitable result of failing to properly regulate the market: it gets regulatory-captured by the big corps to prop themselves up instead. This is what laissez-faire always devolves to, by its inherent nature.
Why would the government want to regulate it? They set themselves up to collect taxes by location. They won’t risk disruption of sales tax in those jurisdictions.
It’s turtles all the way down.
They also need commercial real estate property prices to stay high. Demand for commercial real estate drops and the values therefore drops and the bank is stuck holding the bag for a lot of these loans.
So get back to work for your company and go to the office to the bank doesn’t fail!
Organize, unionize, strike. They made a bad gamble buying all that overpriced commercial real estate and want to push the loss onto workers.
Which only means they don’t understand sunk cost. Business people are supposed to understand sunk cost.
This is extremely dumb. If you’re wasting money on something you stop spending money on it, you don’t use it for the sake of using it… that’s still wasting money just less obvious.
That’s why my company sold our building. The majority of employees wanted to continue working from home and the building wasn’t big enough for our company anyway. It needed a lot of work so they sold it. No mention of a new facility or RTO in 3 years.
Breaking those types of leases and selling those types of buildings off or not trivial. They will need to figure out a way to ease out of the market, but until then, this is the way they rationalize it
It’s still cheaper to let them sit empty than it is to make people go back to the office. This is sunk cost fallacy
Depends on the perception. If people see the company as weird or wasteful, it can hurt the company. Think of all the negative press companies get. It’s not rational, but it exists and companies fight to minimize those sort of things.
Boo hoo.
I’ve always been of a mind that the real reason is the one they’ll never admit: it makes a liar out of their self-aggrandizement. It has to really hurt the ego to see all the work still getting done, or even [gasp] more work getting done the less they are involving themselves in other people’s tasks.
Yeah, it is, and always has been about control.
Either that, or is simply way less satisfying to those sociopathic fucks when they can’t see the fear in their peons’ eyes as they crack the whip. When your wage slave is only a tiny moving picture on your screen and they can turn you off with a press of a button it’s way harder to exert your authority over them and make them miserable (because you don’t pay them to be happy and satisfied after all!)…
They need those offices to be full and the demand to be high for commercial real estate. If commercial real estate becomes less valuable, the banks who own and finance that real estate lose a ton of money.
If the offices are empty, the companies can’t even sell the real estate because other companies won’t want to buy it either. This will devalue commercial real estate properties as a whole, leaving businesses with a lot of high interest loans to the banks for assets that are worth much less than the loans they took out.
When those companies go under, The banks will be left with a bunch of commercial real estate that is essentially worthless.
So you’re all working for the bank so your bosses can pay the loans for the real estate for your office. The furniture inside the office itself is worthless.
When taking out a loan, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to pay it back.
This is the risk the business owners chose to take. Now they’re upset that it’s not working out in their favor and trying to change the rules (as usual) so they never lose.
Remember how they stopped people buying gamestop stock?
It’s not just the business owners. And yes, while that’s a risk they will have to take it affects the whole community.
Cool. Perhaps they should consider instead fucking off and dying.
Sunk cost falacy
Paywalled
