Which only means they don’t understand sunk cost. Business people are supposed to understand sunk cost.
They need those offices to be full and the demand to be high for commercial real estate. If commercial real estate becomes less valuable, the banks who own and finance that real estate lose a ton of money.
If the offices are empty, the companies can’t even sell the real estate because other companies won’t want to buy it either. This will devalue commercial real estate properties as a whole, leaving businesses with a lot of high interest loans to the banks for assets that are worth much less than the loans they took out.
When those companies go under, The banks will be left with a bunch of commercial real estate that is essentially worthless.
So you’re all working for the bank so your bosses can pay the loans for the real estate for your office. The furniture inside the office itself is worthless.
This is extremely dumb. If you’re wasting money on something you stop spending money on it, you don’t use it for the sake of using it… that’s still wasting money just less obvious.
That’s why my company sold our building. The majority of employees wanted to continue working from home and the building wasn’t big enough for our company anyway. It needed a lot of work so they sold it. No mention of a new facility or RTO in 3 years.
Breaking those types of leases and selling those types of buildings off or not trivial. They will need to figure out a way to ease out of the market, but until then, this is the way they rationalize it
It’s still cheaper to let them sit empty than it is to make people go back to the office. This is sunk cost fallacy
I’ve always been of a mind that the real reason is the one they’ll never admit: it makes a liar out of their self-aggrandizement. It has to really hurt the ego to see all the work still getting done, or even [gasp] more work getting done the less they are involving themselves in other people’s tasks.
Either that, or is simply way less satisfying to those sociopathic fucks when they can’t see the fear in their peons’ eyes as they crack the whip. When your wage slave is only a tiny moving picture on your screen and they can turn you off with a press of a button it’s way harder to exert your authority over them and make them miserable (because you don’t pay them to be happy and satisfied after all!)…
Yeah, it is, and always has been about control.
Cool. Perhaps they should consider instead fucking off and dying.
Sunk cost falacy
Paywalled
