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Comment by Zelphyr | Hacker News Reader

I love what Scott Hanselman said about this:

So, Amazon wants everyone to return to the office. Does that mean they also want us to return to the mall and supporting small local businesses?

https://x.com/shanselman/status/1836140762075210102

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I don't think so. My personal and very unpopular belief is that RTO is largely based on tax breaks that cities give to companies for their buildings being a percentage occupied and thus bringing more tax revenue to local businesses.

This might be a naive question but what's to stop a company from telling a city or municipality that they meet the percentage? Not like there's any way the city can verify.

I suppose parking lot occupancy would give it away for the big businesses that have their own parking. One could probably cheat this by getting car fleet purchasing power and storing vehicles in said lots but I think that may be obvious and getting caught would be quite the scandal.

Once again, its no ones job to enforce this much less inspect parking lots. You could go all “well they could mine satellite data” and sure they could but they could do that for a lot of issues that they don’t currently. Like how you can see that many homes are hoarder houses/illegal dumps just from a cursory panning of satellite imagery and the city doesn’t do anything.

They would be committing fraud?

There may not be a direct metric, but there are a number of mechanisms that municipalities can use to track things:

* use of public transit

* use of roads / traffic measuring

* measuring counts of pedestrians

* anecdotes and actual data about the performance of businesses near offices

* water, electricity, and other utility metrics

* parking tax rates

These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head, and I am sure there are many others that are not obvious.

Those are just the things off the top of my head.

If you have been in the SV area too long, it is easy to forget this but in most places most companies strive to obey the law. Because social compact and a predictable regime of how people behave and all that.

A tax "break" by a city to businesses for requiring their employees to work in an office building in the city would be public information, available on any city's website. Do you have any links?

Do you have any links?

No. All I have is the discussion with people that built about $1.2bn worth of office buildings but that was only for one company so it's entirely anecdotal and may not apply to other businesses that may not have negotiated tax breaks with the city.

Here you go: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...

Thanks!

The loss of productivity/time from added congestion alone would make this unprofitable for everyone involved.

No, because remote work is ostensibly a productivity and management problem. It's a pretense, of course.

I really didn’t get this tweet. I go to the mall anytime I need to. Support local businesses every day. What’s the connection with going to the office?! Can anybody explain?

Amazon has, for many people, completely replaced malls, local shopping, and similar, with the much more convenient alternative of remote-shopping. This tweet is observing that the same pattern applies to remote-working, and asking if there should be a "return-to-local-shopping" the way Amazon wants a "return-to-local-office".

Or, in other words, it's an observation of hypocrisy on Amazon's part.

Got it. Thank you!

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