Will Amazon's Return-to-Office Mandate Revitalize Downtown Seattle? (seattlemag.com) 72
"Amazon required employees to work from the office five days a week starting January 2nd," writes the Seattle Times, "a change from the company's three-day in-office mandate that had been in effect since May 2023."
And as Seattle's largest employer (with 50,000 Seattle-based workers), this had an impact, according to data the Times cites from the nonprofit Downtown Seattle Association: In January, downtown Seattle recorded the second-highest daily average for weekday worker foot traffic since March 2020. It also saw 2 million unique visitors on its sidewalks last month. That represents 94% of the visitors downtown Seattle saw in January 2019, the Downtown Seattle Association found...
In a statement Friday, Amazon said "we're excited by the innovation, collaboration and connection we've seen already with our teams working in person together...." Jon Scholes [the president of the Downtown Seattle Association] said Amazon's return has been a boon for downtown Seattle. As the city's largest employer, its mandate instantly brought more people to shop and dine around South Lake Union, the Denny Triangle and surrounding neighborhoods... "I think we're seeing people get reacquainted with the reasons they liked working downtown prepandemic," Scholes said. He expects to continue seeing an uptick in foot traffic over the course of the year as more companies follow Amazon's lead and the weather warms up.
But Seattle magazine says the statistics show foot traffic in neighborhoods where Amazon's offices are located (South Lake Union and Denny Regrade) "at 74% of that of January 2019. Overall, downtown-area foot traffic was 9% higher than it was a year ago, though only 57% of the pre-pandemic average."
And as Seattle's largest employer (with 50,000 Seattle-based workers), this had an impact, according to data the Times cites from the nonprofit Downtown Seattle Association: In January, downtown Seattle recorded the second-highest daily average for weekday worker foot traffic since March 2020. It also saw 2 million unique visitors on its sidewalks last month. That represents 94% of the visitors downtown Seattle saw in January 2019, the Downtown Seattle Association found...
In a statement Friday, Amazon said "we're excited by the innovation, collaboration and connection we've seen already with our teams working in person together...." Jon Scholes [the president of the Downtown Seattle Association] said Amazon's return has been a boon for downtown Seattle. As the city's largest employer, its mandate instantly brought more people to shop and dine around South Lake Union, the Denny Triangle and surrounding neighborhoods... "I think we're seeing people get reacquainted with the reasons they liked working downtown prepandemic," Scholes said. He expects to continue seeing an uptick in foot traffic over the course of the year as more companies follow Amazon's lead and the weather warms up.
But Seattle magazine says the statistics show foot traffic in neighborhoods where Amazon's offices are located (South Lake Union and Denny Regrade) "at 74% of that of January 2019. Overall, downtown-area foot traffic was 9% higher than it was a year ago, though only 57% of the pre-pandemic average."
No (Score:5, Insightful)
No it will not
Betteridge's law of headlines (Score:5, Informative)
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Will Amazon's Return-to-Office Mandate Dampen Downtown Seattle Revitalization?
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For the newcomers here, see Betteridge's law of headlines [wikipedia.org].
Came to post this... You beat me to it.
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The law confuses a worthless title with worthless content. Often those go together, but not always.
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For the newcomers here, see Betteridge's law of headlines [wikipedia.org].
For the newcomers to Portland, know that the law of local politics is what answered that question.
Betteridge was just standing there with a two-headed coin waiting to call the obvious.
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For the newcomers here, see Betteridge's law of headlines [wikipedia.org].
But even more salient to the problem, revitalizing Seattle would require doing something other than "a paradise for trust fund 20-somethings pretending to be techbros to retire, and a cyberpunk dystopia for anyone making less than six figures". So, no, Seattle's gonna remain a dump for the same reasons every other place that's tried that and wiped out their middle class as a result has. Go woke or go broke, after all, and Seattle's choosing the "go broke" side.
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If I had to RTO, and don't just quit outright, I would refuse to "eat out" or whatever, just out of principle.
I'm not going to "revitalize" anywhere that I don't want to be. Fuck that and fuck them and fuck all of it.
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All that fucking is gonna revitalize something!
Re:How can it be avoided? (Score:4, Interesting)
Say you live and work in Suburb X. Then your boss orders you to physically go to Downtown Y, daily. Isn't some of the money you used to spend in X, now going to be spent in Y instead?
Depends on how far away we're talking about. If you live at least an hour away and your workplace does not offer supper, then yes. Otherwise, probably not.
I'm forced to commute to the next down over for work. I have eaten in that city's downtown area exactly twice, both as part of work parties. I don't do it generally, because it is not close to the office, nor close to where I live, nor along the freeway between the two. I got soda and a sandwich in a convenience store near work exactly once while charging my car at a supercharger. That's it, and I've been working there for almost a decade.
If there weren't food available easily at work, then yeah, it would, but as long as the path of least resistance is a corporate cafe for both lunch and dinner, there's no chance of spending any meaningful amount of money at businesses near work.
For non-food, the same is also largely true, because I mostly do shopping on the weekends, not on my way home from work, and even if I need something in the evenings, I'd rather go to a store that I know than to a store that is near work. Also, there are no stores near work. :-)
That's the big problem. Companies take over tens of blocks, and because there are no houses interspersed among them, there's no incentive for retailers to put locations in those areas, so basically you have mile after mile with nothing but tech companies. You're more likely to live close to a restaurant than to work close to one. You're more likely to live close to a Lowe's or a Walmart or a Home Depot or a CVS than to work close to one. And as long as that is the case, the folks hoping for a retail revolution from RTO are likely to be badly disappointed.
Retail isn't dying because of WFH. Retail is dying because the pandemic made people rely on Amazon deliveries more, and people realized just how much shopping sucks. And no amount of RTO is going to change the fundamental calculus of the situation.
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Say you live and work in Suburb X. Then your boss orders you to physically go to Downtown Y, daily. Isn't some of the money you used to spend in X, now going to be spent in Y instead?
Depends on how far away we're talking about. If you live at least an hour away and your workplace does not offer supper, then yes. Otherwise, probably not.
So, in the one specific case of Amazon in Seattle which doesn't give free lunches, this suggests that some employees will indeed spend money in surrounding businesses for food.
One other consideration is that Seattle's mass transit system is relatively good (better than most US cities, although still worse than most European cities). Before the pandemic, around
half of all downtown visitors arrived via mass transit. Transit riders generally spend money along the way.
In fact, Seattle is an interesting case st
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Say you live and work in Suburb X. Then your boss orders you to physically go to Downtown Y, daily. Isn't some of the money you used to spend in X, now going to be spent in Y instead?
Depends on how far away we're talking about. If you live at least an hour away and your workplace does not offer supper, then yes. Otherwise, probably not.
So, in the one specific case of Amazon in Seattle which doesn't give free lunches, this suggests that some employees will indeed spend money in surrounding businesses for food.
I know they aren't free. That's why I didn't use the word "free" anywhere in that post. The fact of the matter is that most employees won't leave the office if the office has a decent cafeteria, whether they have to pay for the food or not, because it is way faster to get food at a corporate cafe in the next building over than to drive somewhere to a restaurant outside the two-mile-by-two-mile cluster of corporate office buildings.
Also, most companies do not make any profit on their corporate cafes, and m
If by revitalize you mean enshittify (Score:3, Insightful)
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More angry nerds fuming in cafes.
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It's just another reason to buy from anyone other than Amazon any time you can.
how do they know? (Score:4, Interesting)
"It also saw 2 million unique visitors on its sidewalks last month."
How do they know they were unique visitors? Face recognition cameras?
Re:how do they know? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeahâ¦right (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Yeahâ¦right (Score:3)
You'd imagine that certain habits would gradually return, such as eating out rather than bringing your tupperware, and some drinks and snacks after office hours. It takes time but the scale of amazon offices matters.
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Fast food is in par with sit down restaurant prices now. Unless it's a good taco truck or some mom and pop place I'm not spending $15 on a lunch.
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15$? I spent 95$ for two pizzas and drink in downtown Seattle one year ago. Yes, Amazon paid for it.
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A bunch of underpaid warehouse workers
Going to go out on a limb and say warehouse workers are not affected in any way whatsoever by a return to office mandate. You think they took the warehouses home with them like a laptop or something?
Was Amazon prohibiting people from coming in? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to wonder if Amazon was forbidding employees from coming in to their offices. If employees wanted to be there and weren't allowed, then allowing them back would be a welcome relief.
But if they were allowed to work in the office and chose not to, then forcing them to work in the office is unlikely to beneficial. "Revitalizing" by forcing people to be somewhere they don't want to be doesn't sound very "vital" to me.
Claims that people are excited and innovative in an environment that they're forced to be against their will is definitely a lie. I can absolutely believe there are work environments where people want to be in person, so if people were prohibited from working in person and then allowed, that would be one thing. But if people were permitted to commute to an office and chose not to, forcing them to commute is not going to foster excitement and innovation.
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Even if they were truly enthusiastic about coming back, it wouldn't make any difference. The decay of any urban center isn't attributable to one factor which, when corrected, will 'revitalize' it. In this case specifically and mirrored by many others, the state of the city center results from decades of bad policy and neglect. Commerce and property ownership are discouraged through high taxes and onerous regulation while large populations of destitute people are encouraged to live there with permissive p
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That's not even remotely what vital means in this context. It simply means that they will be using services and spending money in the area. And they will.
I HATE the area around my work. But I also get up too gawddamn early and get home too fucking late to make a pack lunch every day, so some business in/around my workplace makes $15-20 extra every day selling me food when I work in the office instead of home. Some gas station sells 12 extra gallons of gas a week. Some local mailbox store gets a commissio
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I HATE the area around my work. But I also get up too gawddamn early and get home too fucking late to make a pack lunch every day, so some business in/around my workplace makes $15-20 extra every day selling me food when I work in the office instead of home. Some gas station sells 12 extra gallons of gas a week. Some local mailbox store gets a commission on the FedEx packages I send. Etc. etc. That's "revitalization".
That might be true for small businesses, but for large businesses like Amazon, it isn't:
So their neighborhoods are devastated now? (Score:5, Interesting)
So the money they were spending locally at their own communities has now dried up, and it's all being sucked into Seattle city?
Re:So their neighborhoods are devastated now? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The waste that is RTO. (Score:4, Insightful)
A single employee working full-time with an hour-long commute to work, will waste an entire 40-hour work per month sitting behind a steering wheel. That amounts to 480 wasted hours a year. Three fucking months of full time employment wasted behind a steering wheel. With an additional $200-300 per month in gas, maintenance costs, and increased insurance rates. That is the initial RTO cost for one employee.
In a 1,000-person organization of full-time employees, that’s 40,000 work-hours wasted per month, sitting behind a steering wheel. That’s an organizations most valuable asset, choking on tailpipe fumes. Getting sicker from hours of additional stagnant sitting. Dying in car accidents. Wasting 40,000 work hours per month.
When I negotiated WFH a decade ago, I had that hour+ commute. I told my employer I would give them an additional hour per work day if I could have the other hour I would have wasted commuting in the gym. Both parties benefited greatly from that arrangement.
RTO has NOTHING to do with efficiency. It has everything to do with CONTROL. Fuck the corruption that claims otherwise. This is when the billionaire investors should come out of the woodwork and start up WFH-exclusive organizations. It would be trivial to poach the best of the best right now. And you can sure as shit afford to pay them more when you don’t have obscene real estate costs on the books.
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The entire point of identifying waste here, is to point out the blatant hypocrisy when it comes to RTO pimps claiming “efficiency” is the reason RTO needs to happen. The same company that will donate to “green” funds to claim they qualify for more “green” tax breaks. All while senselessly polluting with mandated RTO tailpipes filling roads again, attacking and destroying the entire point of “going green”.
Upwards of three fucking months wasted per full-time e
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We know damn well RTO has far more to do with keeping middle-earth management cube farmers employed for obsolete reasons
I don't know any such thing, I prefer to work at the office because I'm more productive. The only time I want to work from home is when it's advantageous to my personal life, like I have to catch up on laundry or someone is coming to fix an internet issue. My brain prefers to rest away from work at home and prefers to lock in at work at the office.
re: always about control (Score:2)
Let's be honest though? If the hill you want to die on is about your employer having "control" over you? You better fight for a cellphone free workplace too!
One of my pet-peeves right now is the fact that the requirement of carrying a company-provided or partially paid-for personal cellphone ensures they're able to keep you on a really short leash at all times. (And man, is Microsoft Teams a horrible addition to this mess! Installed it on my cell so I had the "freedom" to at least jump into a meeting withou
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You may not be aware, but such devices have an "off" feature.
Driving? Phone off for safety.
Meeting? Phone off for quality.
Not work hours? Phone off for privacy.
I have a work phone. It is very often in the "off" mode. It has been that way for ten years.
Productivity went up during WFH (Score:2)
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1. Car accidents from commuting should count against a company's OSHA recordable deaths / injuries. To include chronic factors such as health impacts of stress, extended sitting, and microparticle inhalation. Since driving is one of the most dangerous things modern people do, with millions injured per year, this may involve hazard pay.
2. All the emissions from commuting should count against the company's own environmental footprint, which would immediately cancel out any LEED or other
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A single employee working full-time with an hour-long commute to work, will waste an entire 40-hour work per month sitting behind a steering wheel. That amounts to 480 wasted hours a year. Three fucking months of full time employment wasted behind a steering wheel. With an additional $200-300 per month in gas, maintenance costs, and increased insurance rates. That is the initial RTO cost for one employee.
That is the price to get things done. Funny that the cost for the company is placed straight on the shoulders of the employees. "I need people to work at THIS specific location. Whether or not they already exist at that location is not a cost I am willing to consider. Someone else should pay that cost."
I know I know. I should be thankful I have a job at all or else I would starve and freeze to death (except I wouldn't. I can live off the land, except I can't, since that land is owned by someone else)
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I am in the latter case: i have a pizza restaurant at 30 meters from my house and a McDonalds at 300 meters, and also a mid-size supermarket, a couple of Chinese restaurants, a bakery and bars. Sometimes, when I WFH, at lunch I go to the pizza restaurant bec
sorta (Score:5, Interesting)
Well yes, economically blackmailing people into geographically congregating over certain hours and days, and allowing small businesses to form to feed them, sell them gasoline, etc is going to "revitalize" a downtown economically.
Not sure it's something we should be happy about.
Blackmail (Score:2, Funny)
Well yes, economically blackmailing people into geographically congregating over certain hours and days
That's funny. I guess I'm economically blackmailing the small grocery store near my house into selling the donuts I like as it's the only thing I buy from there.
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When someone makes an obvious, egregiously ludicrous comparison, there are a couple of ways to interpret this:
1) they're just stupid and either didn't understand your point, are responding entirely emotionally, or genuinely believe something that makes no sense, (all of which are generally pitiable and not worth intellectual response) or
2) they're saying something they know isn't true as a power move, to make a political point, or for some other undisclosed motivation other than "let's together try to resol
Re:sorta (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think that people being forced to return to a city they don't want to visit is really going to spur much economic revival. I'd imagine that many people will avoid going to the major corporate owned restaurants out of spite, knowing that they probably lobbied Bezos and Jassy to force them to return to the office.
RTO is the Devil's Agenda (Score:3)
Working from home has proven its mettle. Businesses should abandon inefficient downtown office space. It can be repurposed.
Does amazon still employ that many in Seattle? (Score:2)
If traffic is down 74% from pre-pandemic maybe that's because Amazon has gone through multiple layoffs of its tech force, across the country, in the last few years. Same with many of the big-tech firms - Oracle, META, Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet/Google.
Just build more housing (Score:2, Insightful)
Any city wondering how to "revitalize" their downtowns will seemingly do anything whatsoever before they actually hammer down to say "no more" to the NIMBYs, cut through the stupid zoning, height, setback, staircase, SRO and parking rules that have contributed to the housing issues in the first place.
A lot of people actually enjoy living in the city but it's become too expensive and too risky for many, that's the core issue. No company forcing workers in can really solve that.
It's doubly funny when we talk
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The problem which all urban centers have is that past a certain tipping point, revitalization becomes impossible. Most cities are funded through property tax revenues, which adversely affects their policy choices - if they allow unlimited growth, the supply of housing will increase, but the value of properties will fall. Consequently, the publicly funded services - police, infrastructure, schools - will likewise become hamstrung by the falling tax revenues, which will further reduce property values. If
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The problem which all urban centers have is that past a certain tipping point, revitalization becomes impossible
This isn't really true, this is a policy choice, everything in your post is more than likely somewhat correct but these are not immutable laws of nature, these are choices we make either by government or community. Sometimes what is needed is drasitc, take Detroit for example which has been through it's own revitlization but it required condensing population centers closer to the center of town, reincorprating outer "cities" into the greater metro area, bulldozing dilapidated and abandoned properties etc.
curtails new building permits to the extent that rent rises faster than inflation, the city becomes a magnet for wealthy investors -
I
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We live 5 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh.
Only thing keeping us in the city is kid's school. If we moved out of the city, we would have a longer commute to drop off and pick up. Fuck that.
Quality private schools further from the city are a lot more expensive, if they exist at all.
And no, I don't want to send my kid to a government school.
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I live near a suburb "bedroom community" of Seattle. One of the primary attractions of the town center was a nice gardening store/nursery with a restaurant and coffee shop. Sort of the center of town park. Some time ago, I overheard a guy, new to town,asking where that fabulous garden store was that he had heard so much about.
"The bulldozed it to build the commie block apartment building you live in."
Seattle used to be "cool". With all the waterfront businesses, fishing boats, etc. But all that has been r
I live North of Seattle - NO it won't (Score:2, Informative)
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Drug addicts and homeless people are symptoms of a larger problem. Locking them up does nothing to help or cure them. The problem is there is no easy answer or solution.
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Locking them up does nothing to help or cure them.
Don't care. At least they'll be of the streets.
Boom/bust cycles will kick such businesses (Score:2)
Having a city's commerce depend on the ebb and flow of telework is asking for trouble. During boom years hybrid work will be a common perk, shrinking shops who depend on biz traffic, and then the reverse during bust years.
leaving (Score:2)
Congestion? (Score:2)
And what about levels of congestion on the roads and public transport?
Quit, join a labor union, or form a worker-owned c (Score:2)
It reminds me how poor Chinese workers are being given arbitrary calisthenics "tests" to get a job now.
The struggle against the bosses is global and eternal, and workers are losing badly right now.