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The big fortune 100 tech companies are also commercial real estate owners and landlords. Look at all the buildings that Amazon owns and subleases in Seattle.
by lamontcg 3y ago
The big fortune 100 tech companies are also commercial real estate owners and landlords. Look at all the buildings that Amazon owns and subleases in Seattle.
Those executives absolutely have an incentive to be pushing RTO because of their commercial real estate risk.
They also have an outsized bullhorn and the industry tends to watch what they do and report over what they do, and they have PR budgets which can get articles written the way they want. Bezos outright owns the WaPo.
Further down the ladder that PR will land on businesses where it just reinforces the attitudes of management towards RTO and gives them arguments to make in meetings. The people in those meetings don't necessarily have any skin in the commercial real estate game, but if they've spent the past 3 years reading articles about remote work and RTO published in the business press influenced by those who do have a whole lot of skin in the game, how do you attribute causality?
They way I'd look at it is that you can't take it in isolation and you need to step outside of naive root cause analysis that looks at the manager in the company who has no skin in the game and says that they can't possibly be influenced by the commercial real estate issues. For any individual "atom" of a manager in this analysis their own biases will more strongly influence what they're doing, but everyone in that room has been reading the same articles, and industrial propaganda and PR actually is effective at shaping attitudes. They are blowing on the dice, or turning up the temperature, or whatever analogy you like that draws a parallel to statistical mechanics and the bulk behavior of matter in the presence of individual randomness.
- flappyeagle 3y ago[flagged]
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago>"Stop repeating this meme." LOL. It's literally the subject of the article. Empty Corporate Real-estate, offices, is driving a Return to Work effort by those corporations. So many people here are saying it is a 'conspiracy theory' hence not true. Many financial news outlets have reported on this, the properties are public knowledge. Even Amazon does check its bottom line from time to time. It is possible they do care about hits to it. They aren't so profitable that they don't care about expenses.
- flappyeagle 3y ago40B out of 1.4T is 2.8% Their market cap has swung by 20x that this year. It’s fun to theorize about creepy ulterior motives but doing some basic arithmetic blows the whole thing up.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoA lot of people get fired, or get promotions, based on a swing of 2.8%. That is definitely a large enough percentage to take seriously and not call this 'Pizza Gate'.
- DonsDiscountGas 3y agoAccording to [0], Amazon owns $40B in real estate. Which isn't a lot compared to a $1.4T market cap. OTOH, if the cost of pushing people to RTO is less than $40B it's still worth it. [0] https://azbigmedia.com/real-estate/how-much-land-does-amazon-actually-own/ https://azbigmedia.com/real-estate/how-much-land-does-amazon...
- thfuran 3y agoWhat do you mean? Unless they plan to sell, all the real estate value does for them is increase their tax burden. It's the companies that lease out commercial real estate that need to maintain prices.
- fatfingerd 3y agoOnce companies are established they also tend to insist all their investments are legitimate barriers to entry. I doubt Sears would have lasted as long as it did if people didn't fear its ultimately worthless real estate investments.
- rsynnott 3y agoAmazon’s an outlier here, though. Most office-oriented employers lease most or all of their space.
- chaos_emergent 3y agoThank you, this is a far more cogent model of the incentives and behaviors in place than all the conspiratorial essays on a boogeyman plurality conspiring against the working class.