Everyone’s over remote work except for the workers themselves
Excerpt from fortune.com
The economy has a case of remote work. That’s the story corporate America told in second-quarter earnings calls.
To some CEOs, any ills their companies face inevitably come down to the fact of people logging on from home. As a result, if their business hinges on a steady hum of commuters, they’ve struggled to adapt to the reality of prolonged telework.
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.
Bloomberg calls this the “Pret Index,” which tracks transactions at café chain Pret a Manger. Known for its omnipresence in the lunch scene of New York’s and London’s financial districts, but also with a sizable suburban presence, Pret is an ideal vehicle for measuring remote work’s reshaping of daily commuting habits—and the huge impact on business as a result.
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.”
Randy Garutti, CEO of Pret rival Shake Shack, told analysts on Thursday that in Midtown Manhattan, “40% of our lunch guests just aren’t here yet…whether it’s subway mobility, tourism, and other things that just haven’t returned to where they were.”
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