Ping pong with co-workers bespeckled in Warby Parker; beer carts and fancy cappuccino with a boss who glistening with Glossier; talking about Buzzfeed lists while seated on uncomfortable bar stools—so was the advertised narrative of the increasingly bygone era of WeWork and the 2010s office culture. The era's peak wasn’t that long ago, but it rapidly ended in the early 2020s and transformed into a dim shade of millennial pink.
You need no more evidence of this fading office culture than WeWork on Tuesday warning it had “substantial doubt” regarding its ability to keep the lights on. It prompted an immediate 25% drop to its share price to close at just 13 cents on Wednesday. Despite trying an overhaul over the last couple of years, the co-working space’s current predicament is in part due to something beyond its control: No one really wants to go to the office anymore, at least not five days a week. While the company shared that second-quarter revenue was slightly up from the same period a year earlier, it still suffered a net loss of $397 million for the quarter. And the company's office occupancy hasn’t really rebounded, coming in at 72% by the end of the second quarter, just a 2% increase year-over-year, and actually down one percentage point from the previous three months.
