You just have to visit San Francisco in the middle of a workday to see it very clearly. Picture above. Posh hotels and upscale retailers are closing shop in droves. Entire floors of once-prestigious office towers loom vacant. Streets are devoid of traffic. Demands for officer workers to return to in-person work have fallen on deaf ears, many preferring to quit than to return to the office. Over 6% of the population has left this mega-expensive city to work remotely or, for a few, in a hybrid work world where office time is tempered with remote work.
Many white-collar workers have learned that working in an office is hardly necessary. In fact, by eliminating commute time, those whose services are performed on computers and/or telephone have actually increased their productivity. And in a city like San Francisco, where a small studio or one-bedroom apartment can cost $3,000+/month, the mere thought of having to maintain a “home” presence for even parttime office services makes even hybrid work untenable. Where hands-on manufacturing, resource extraction and the physical movement of goods are not the focus, for many in the labor force, there is no justification for in-office services. They believe that all the “benefits” of in-person networking, team-building and synergistic ideation are vastly overblown.
The pandemic – with lockdowns and a heavy shift to online transactions, the avoidance of crowded spaces, meetings and confined jet travel – changed the perception of many in the labor force. Sure, pent-up frustration has restored the travel-for-pleasure market, and for most of the nation, bricks and mortar retailers are seeing a return to normalcy, but some pandemic habits seem to have become ingrained in a post-pandemic world. Writing for the June 16th Wall Street Journal, Christopher Mims explores which changes seem to be permanent and which are not:
“Online shopping waned and in-store spending largely returned to prepandemic levels, and companies from Amazon to Shopify fell hard from pandemic-induced heights. But even as people have returned to old ways, certain habits have persisted, and begun to evolve.
“We’re now entering what might be called a ‘hybrid’ era of tech-based conveniences, in which consumers modify their behavior to reflect a changing balance of cost against time and effort saved. For example, ordering food from apps is more popular than ever, but more people are opting to save themselves a few bucks by picking it up rather than having it delivered…
“You’d think that, now that more people are back in offices, and out and about in general, the pandemic trend of ordering everything we eat and drink through our phones would be in decline. But that’s not the case at all. People are ordering more food through apps than ever. It used to be dinner, maybe lunch, but now they’re adding breakfast, snacks and coffee, says Dorothy Calba, a research analyst at Euromonitor International, a market-research firm…
“People are paying for gym memberships again. But they’re also working out at home—or at least buying equipment and app-based subscriptions that allow them to. Fitness has become a ‘multichannel’ experience, says Davide Calzoni, a consultant at Euromonitor International… ‘Many customers are adopting a hybrid exercise schedule that combines gym visits with at-home workouts,’ he adds.
“As the pandemic waned, sales of Peloton’s bikes crashed, leading to huge losses and a major reorganization of the company. And yet the number of people getting exercise through a connected fitness device—or even just through classes they stream on their phones or other devices—has continued to grow. Just before pandemic lockdowns in the U.S., Peloton reported 712,000 subscribers. As of its latest quarterly report, the company had 3.1 million subscribers. Growth has slowed, but the company also said in its most recent quarterly report that it grew its subscriber base by 5% compared with a year previous… Overall, the number of adults in the U.S. who use some kind of connected fitness service has gone from 24 million in 2019 to a projected 44.5 million by the end of this year, according to eMarketer.
“Peloton has for years lost around 1% of its subscribers a month, an unusually low rate of churn, according to data from the company and surveys by market analysis firm YipitData. Once people pay $1,500 and up for a piece of at-home fitness tech, they rarely quit. That said, the company is more likely to lose users who only subscribe to its classes through its app, which the company is investing in, and rolling out new hardware-free subscriptions for…
“Now that people are back to the office, you’d think they’d be making fewer video calls. Obnoxious buzzer noise: You’d be wrong… The number of meetings—both scheduled and spontaneous—made by the average Microsoft Teams user has tripled since 2020, says Colette Stallbaumer, a general manager in the Microsoft 365 and Future of Work teams at Microsoft… The seemingly never-ending rise in video calls can be explained in part by the fact that, while more people are back in the office, those offices are spread all over the world. On top of that, widespread hybrid work means someone is nearly always out of the office. ‘In every in-person meeting I’m in, whether that’s with a customer or my team, there is someone, almost always, still on Teams, participating in a hybrid or remote setting,’ says Stallbaumer.”
Even attendance at local movie theaters has changed. That 45+ age group that had once made going to the movies a weekly event is fading in relevance, perhaps because their children showed them how to sign up for the plethora of in-home video subscription services. Today, with few exceptions, it is the big screen blockbusters that seem to dominate the Theater-going industry, with traditional dramas mostly relegated to the home screen. Even live theater and old-world concert-going have taken a continued downward tick, particularly where older audiences are the target.
We live in a world with political polarization – people literally at each other’s throats, diehard fundamentalists seeing an opportunity to impose their “values” on everyone – and are coming to grips with a still-nascent technology shift struggling to deal with artificial intelligence. This particular era – pandemic and post-pandemic – is rife with changes that have created instability and uncertainty. Climate change has imposed searing heat, flooding and aridification with an uptick in the severity of major destructive weather phenomena, making a bad situation that much worse. Life will continue, patterns will continue to change. But as Mims states:
“The implications of these shifts are all around us, and represent a profound change for many parts of our economy. To put it in terms a social psychologist might appreciate, habits are hard to acquire, but also hard to extinguish. The biggest barrier to adoption of new technology is typically our own ingrained ways of doing things. But that same stubbornness and inertia means that once we’re forced to adopt new tools and ways to get our needs met, we aren’t about to abandon them.” One thing is for sure, no matter how hard people wish to return to the past, we are not going back!
I’m Peter Dekom, but without attempts at understanding each other, finding middle ground, adapting to change becomes more a quest to impose ill-conceived solutions on a general public that is beginning to turn on and blame segments within the population for those changes.
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