Restaurants near Target’s Minneapolis headquarters are calling for employees to return to the office

Target is among the Fortune 100 companies that are still comfortable with their Corona-era telecommuting arrangements, but their Minneapolis headquarters drew so much traffic to local businesses that it has They are demanding that staff be forced to return to the cabins. It is now the moral responsibility of Target employees to collectively subsidize Minneapolis restaurateurs.

Downtown Target’s workforce was estimated at 7,100 in 2022 — down from 8,500 in 2021, but still enough to make it the neighborhood’s largest employer — on paper. But how many actually work regularly in the city center? Target won’t share the data, though it claims more of its employees are choosing to return to headquarters.

Observers say the gap is obvious.

“That’s a lot of lunches and cups of coffee and rides on the light rail and bus, and that hurts us a lot,” said commercial real estate agent Tom Tracy, who specializes in Minneapolis office leasing at Cushman & Wakefield.

The usual “return-to-the-office” motive boils down to the fallacy of sunk costs: it serves to justify long-term leases on company premises, middle-management positions that have nothing to do, and decades-long investments in iconic office productivity doctrines. Emerging articles about how a “return to the office” is required to get people to eat at McCormick & Shmick’s Seafood and Steakhouse is a more contemporary twist on dystopia: superficial, narcissistic, indistinguishable from parody. Dubious yet disturbingly desperate, the last few lies before the liar stops talking and just forces you to do what he’s asking you to do.