Rents, home prices, and office occupancy rates in major cities, especially on the two coasts, are dropping fast. Techies and young professionals have discovered that they can work from home without paying sky-high housing costs in order to be close to the office.
-Stormfax
“all in a presidential election year”
ReplyDeleteThat part of the sentence tells you everything you need to know.
EVERYTHING you see and hear from the media during an election year is about the election.
If all else fails, just yell “Orange man bad!” and you’ll have in an instant 5000 retarded friends.
A very good time to be an introvert.
ReplyDeleteThis is a business question. If your customer base increased 25% when you did all your business online, would you ever go back to face-to-face?
ReplyDeleteDon't forget, when no one comes to your store, you don't have HVAC costs, your power bill is maybe a tenth of what it was before, water bill is nil, you don't need all the nightly clean-up costs, and so on.
My wife works for a large community college system. The above numbers are from her college. She will be working remotely till at least next summer. But here's the nut cruncher. The PTB want to go back to the old way and have every student sitting at a desk.
And here is the part they keep missing. Any given instructor makes a video of each class he or she gives. Once it is on tape, it can be given over and over.
And when you go from a class that can hold 30 students because of physical space to a remote class where one instructor can have hundreds of students, can you just imagine the income the school could be making? With almost zero overhead.
But the people who run schools don't think like that. They want it all to go back like it was. My wife tells me stories about many of the female employees that want so much to go back to "normal" so they can strut around in their high heels!!!!
I'll swear, much of this country need to be evacuated of morons and the rest burned to the ground and begin over.
"And when you go from a class that can hold 30 students because of physical space to a remote class where one instructor can have hundreds of students, can you just imagine the income the school could be making?"
DeleteExcept that, at most schools, at least, students (or parents) aren't going to be willing to fork over the massive tuition payments for online classes with hundreds of students. There's a non-insignificant chance that more than a few schools will see that their income will drop to zero.
There are two issue here:
ReplyDelete1) You can work from home, so you MUST work from home. Back in the day the office would close in the event of a major snowstorm, giving us worker bees time to clear porches, driveways, sidewalks, etc. No we're open so long as the electricity and internet connection holds out. Need to clear things like before? Submit a leave request and it's on you.
2) This will accelerate the trend to outsourcing. Yes, I can code from home. So can the guy in India, and he'll work for a damn sight less than me because his cost of living is significantly less.
The millennials at my company have pissed and moaned about having to use company-supplied devices, so now we have BYOD (D => devices). The company allows you to use your own hardware so long as you agree to install company software on your device con provide connectivity and to isolate your "stuff" and the company's "stuff". So eventually the company will no longer provide equipment at all. You want to work here? Great! buy your own gear. Yes, they'll supposedly pay a stipend to offset the cost, but you've now given the company access to your personal devices. Again, a double-edged sword.
Glad I'm closing in on retirement!