We'll Return to the Office in 2023 But Not to Stores

Certain events change the course of history, or at least the trajectory of the global economy. To name a few: the Black Death, the invention of the steam engine and World War II, and now the scourge of Covid-19. It's been nearly three years since the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic that changed the world as we knew it. You can’t pause economic and social activity for more than a year and go back to normal. It's hard to know in the moment, or even a decade later, what will change for good. In 2020 people thought they might never go to the office again, or leave home without a mask, or that they’d finally maintain their sourdough starter. Now many of our pre-pandemic behaviors have returned, but we're also starting to see what's unlikely to ever go back to the way it was.

Lingering changes that probably won’t last much longer

Some of our habits are still different from before the pandemic, but they may eventually revert. For example, Americans and Brits aren't eating in restaurants as much as they did in 2019. That may because they still fear disease, or inflation has made it too expensive, or people have just rediscovered the joys of home cooking. But eating out, which had been trending upward over the years, will probably come back. People enjoy it too much to stop.

How we work also is still different. Americans have never had so much power in the labor market. Between the great resignation and quiet quitting and an ongoing labor shortage, workers are demanding more, including more flexibility in where they do their jobs. Moving so many people out of the office to their homes during the pandemic did change work. Before Covid about 5% of workdays were at home, during the pandemic it shot up to 60% and it's now leveled off to 30%. In the fall of 2022 about 29.2% of all full-time employees were working from home part of the time, and 13.3% were fully remote. Right now this seems to be a permanent change. Maybe even as monumental as when workers moved off the home farm and to the factory — a change that had a major impact on our society, culture and economy. So in some ways it seems natural that we are moving work back home.

But many bosses don’t love the idea. They’ve built company culture and training regimes that are dependent on personal interaction. Their preferences are going up against workers who are putting a big premium on flexibility and demanding more of it. And this tension is why work from home may not stick around once the labor market tightens in the next few years and workers have less power.