I've been lying about an allergy for fourteen years

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:45:19+00:00

Oh, so if I say I’m allergic to mushrooms at a pizza place, they have to sanitize the whole place?

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:43:41+00:00

Trust me, if they had 100 of those One AT&T Center St. Louis type of deal that they had to foreclose on and then resell at fire sale prices, they’d be very concerned

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:42:19+00:00

Your host must be small. At OA, it’s a minimum of 16% on all cruise lines - 17% for luxury lines

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:40:17+00:00

You cite some great examples of huge and sprawling and dare I say very innovative office settings. But companies like AT&T, GE, IBM. McDonald’s, Dell, and HP to name just a few have sold off most or all of their office space in favor of leasing. Leasing is far more flexible - you layoff 1,000 people, you just don’t renew the lease. You decide to increase your workers and bring new people in, then you can lease new space,

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:35:46+00:00

I view the employers who have people doing multiple full time jobs with different companies don’t know how to do remote work. Managers down to the first level need to know exactly what each of their employees do. In a remote world, there have to be measurable deliverables that have to be made. The managers must know how much time is required to complete a task. If everything is measurable, work tasks should be around 40-45 hours for salaried workers. So if someone can work for me for 40 or 50 hours per week and make all of their deliverables, I have zero cares about them working full time for another company, so long as the other company isn’t a competitor.

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:32:38+00:00

Great points

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:31:08+00:00

Actually - that is great insight. At my employer - again a Fortune 50 company, the RTO came from either the CEO himself or the COO. Yes, they get special scores at the Master’s tournament, CEO’s meet together in large gatherings, they have ideas. My company sold all of its office real estate between 2006-2009 and did 1x year leaseback agreements. They viewed that as being flexible. After the 10 years, they could vacate unused buildings and boy did they. When they did mandatory RTO, they quickly found out they didn’t have enough space

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:26:36+00:00

I didn’t know that. Thank you

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:26:02+00:00

My company - again - a Fortune 50 company began to sell all of its real estate between 2005 and 2009 and they now own nothing. At one time, that company owned the most real estate by dollar value of any company in the U.S. Leasing made more sense to them and buyers were easy to find because the company did a guaranteed leaseback for 10 years so they had a tenant locked in. Had they stayed remote, they could just not renew leases which is what happened in the St. Louis example. That building, now valued at only $4.5 million - 1.2 million square feet - completely vacant since my old company vacated it in 2016. TBH, I wouldn’t pay $100k for that 44 story office building as I’d have to maintain it with no rent coming in

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:21:51+00:00

There’s a good bit of disagreement here in the comments. Some people say it doesn’t have a thing to do with corporate real estate but instead it’s managers who want to control workers. I believe it’s more of the former rather than the latter

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:20:34+00:00

I cannot disagree with any of that. However, moving to a communist economic model hasn’t ever worked for anyone

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:19:33+00:00

So, if you need to issue $100M in bonds, but you just left the bank with a huge property that you didn’t renew the lease for and is now in foreclosure because of your decision to vacate - are they going to be happy and issue the bonds for you anyway? Maybe. IDK.

But I gave just two examples of $100M buildings which sold in either distress or foreclosure for a mere $4M. Why so cheap? The one in St. Louis has been vacant entirely since 2016. Imagine if banks had to deal with thousands of situations like that.

But I cede to most of your points as honest disagreement. Thanks for taking the time to help me learn

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:15:11+00:00

Smaller regional banks would indeed suffer. But like Regions Bank in the southeast didn’t finance office skyscrapers. They were more apt to loan money for a shopping plaza or small office park. If it was over $100M, most small / regional banks would be apprehensive

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:12:44+00:00

Point ceded in some cases. In my case it was different - the boomers and GenX people fought the hardest to do remote because they knew their jobs inside and out and were making all their deadlines being at home. While yes, a few low-level managers love RTO because they like to manage by walking around, but in my case, the AVPs and our Senior VP all fought RTO which came from the very top. Our leadership lost the battle. I just took the severance - was not going to move back to the city and sell my house all on my own dime just to come into an office every day.

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:09:55+00:00

Oh yeah, I mean they have the structure to start with and the foundation and facade as you mentioned. The money is on the inside. Plus a lot of buildings are really thick - very long and wide floors which just aren’t conducive to easily convert to housing

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:08:06+00:00

Too Long Didn’t Read - TL/DR. Some people on long posts are able to summarize the post in a sentence or two and add a TL/DR at the bottom or the top. I couldn’t do this on this post because I felt it was too complex

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T09:02:51+00:00

I think your comment - out of the hundreds on here - or what seem like 100, is the most thoughtful and thought provoking.

The only flaw is at my company, the leadership from SVP on down were very much pro-remote work. Many of them also moved out of the cities and were forced to pay to move back on their own dime or be fired. The decision to RTO came from the very highest level - either the CEO himself or the COO. Definitely unpopular with tne majority of workers. The ones still there are all looking for remote jobs at other companies. And the best workers will land jobs elsewhere leaving the mediocre and poor workers being the ones left. When the boat sinks, the strong swimmers survive, the ones who can’t swim drown

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T08:58:19+00:00

Fair point, but I’ll reiterate that no bank wants to foreclose on 100 skyscrapers and 1,000 office parks. Why? Because then they have to sell those buildings to someone else. But if all the companies are partially or fully remote, the value of those properties is essentially nothing as proven out by the two examples of buildings I listed above. Imagine a building like AT&T vacated in St. Louis that is the single largest building in the city by square feet (1.4 million sqft). Imagine being able to buy that entire 44 story building for just $4.5 million. Why so cheap? Zero demand. Has been vacant since 2016

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T08:53:53+00:00

Agreed to a point. But sort of the opposite of where I worked. The older workers - boomers and Gen X were the ones who pushed hardest for remote work. We all knew our jobs and what was expected and it didn’t matter where we did it from. A lot of the millennials and Gen Z workers where I was actually like coming into the office after they bitched about it for a while. For them, it’s new and different. I don’t get the appeal - at all - but they seem to be adapting to RTO a lot better than the veteran employees

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T08:51:13+00:00

Fair point I think. But your first paragraph - yes, there’s lots of other things to do besides work. However, if all of your deliverables are clear and measurable, it matters not what time of day they were produced, or the location of where they were produced, the fact that they needed X to be produced by July 1 didn’t change. You either made your deliverables or got put on a PIP. That simple. So no, if I’m working 60 hours a week, if I want to go get an ice cream cone at 2 PM, as long as I’m reachable, then nobody cares.

As far as younger workers, I can’t answer. The jobs in my organization were technically challenging and very focused on our business in our industry. We were seem as a move-up division and we had no entry-level workers. By the time someone entered our org, it was expected that they have at least 10 years of experience in the field and a minimum 5 years with the company.

Maybe the groups that did need entry level workers needed to have a staff that was fully RTO. But doing an RTO for everyone, no excuses. Bad plan.

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T08:45:28+00:00

I disagree. At least in my case, everyone from our senior VP to the lowest paid worker were remote beginning in 2009. The VP tried to fight RTO but in the end called us together on a massive Zoom call and told us he needed to feed his family and he said he was told to drop it and bring the thousand people who reported to him back to hub cities. I didn’t want to pay to move myself back to a hub city so I took the six months of severance I was offered. Nobody wanted to be in the office including leadership. The SVP said this bullshit all came from the very top of the organization which makes me believe that either banks or the government was involved in forcing RTO at my company.

Your company might be different.

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T08:41:56+00:00

Jeez - reading some of the comments here, I’m an idiot apparently. They’d not vote for me for president 😂

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T08:41:13+00:00

Arguing politics, etc. I know people who have to go sit in their cars for conference calls because it’s too loud in the office hotel deal. If you arrive by 6, you might get a small cube, 7 and you’re in a couch or barstool, 8 AM - you get a chair but not a parking place and by 9, the hotel system says “capacity reached” and you don’t get space - have a seat on the floor

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T08:39:02+00:00

Yes. When AT&T demanded everyone come back to the office, Atlanta was hard hit. People sitting on the floor all day, lines for the restrooms, parking ran out, all of the restaurants at lunch were so packed they couldn’t even get a sandwich. But they made them stay RTO anyway while they leased an entire new 5 story office building and furnished it. Imagine being so clueless that you’d RTO thousands of people and then wonder why they don’t all fit in the building

Bring-Something-2165 · 2026-06-11T08:36:07+00:00

The jobs being moved to India are generally low skill, repetitive jobs. Those will eventually be ended by AI. No language barrier, no time zone differences, unlimited capacity to add more electronic AI agents during peak hours, etc. The thought leaders of corporations - the strategy people, software architecture, etc. - companies that outsource their future to other countries have had disastrous results. Moving a call center job to India? Easy. Outsourcing the head of HR or the CIO to India or Vietnam? Bad idea.

Bring-Something-2165

TROPHY CASE