The White-Collar Rust Belt

A good name for the phenomenon is the White-Collar Rust Belt, which, humbly, is a name I made up.

I’m referring to the vast quantity of vacant office space in the tall office buildings that you see clustered in big office parks and lining the sides of freeways.

When the sun glimmers off their paneled windows, they look like impressive shining monuments to the so-called service economy.

You’d think the buildings are chock-full of people sitting at their desks, working on computers, doing all the different kinds of work that one can do on a computer.

But that is an illusion, because the buildings are mostly empty inside.

Besides the owners of the properties, who are certainly aware of how dire the situation is, I think I am one of the few people in the world who has witnessed the problem’s extent.

I know for certain that another fellow, in addition to me, a fellow whom I saw yesterday, walking from the building he worked in, to a building with the three top floors fully empty of tenants, knows what is going on as well, and he is taking advantage of the situation in his own special way. More on him below.

What I can’t figure out is what it all means.

Obviously, the jobs that people used to do in those offices are no longer being done there.

The question I don’t have an answer to is: what happened to the jobs? Are the employees working remotely? Have the jobs been sent overseas? Have the businesses gone bankrupt? Are companies replacing their office jobs with artificial intelligence?

The answer is probably yes to all those questions, to some degree.

What is going to happen with these buildings? They don’t feel like places that will be full again someday.

They feel abandoned. By the way, I am visiting these office buildings to promote our new chocolate shop in Kirkland, WA, and the promotion is going well. I can see the positive impact of my effort on the sales numbers every day, and I know that companies are planning to do their holiday and corporate shopping with us.

Also, we’ve recently set up a delivery option by integrating with DoorDash, so that folks who work in an office two miles from our shop never have to leave their desk to have us cater their holiday parties with chocolate.

Here is what many of these buildings look like, and this is why they are still worth visiting despite the vacancies. On the first floor, there are three or four smaller suites, occupied by financial planners, dental and plastic surgery clinics, property management companies, and local CPAs.

They all get flyers from me. On the second through fifth floors, or whatever the building’s highest floor is, there are only one or two very large suites per floor, each occupying one full side of the building.

On most second floors, there are still big anchor companies using the spaces. For example, GoDaddy has a big suite on the second floor of a building.

I spoke with their office manager, and they are planning to do some business with us.

Large national CPA and law firms use big suites on second floors, along with what appear to be tech startups.

Then you get to the third floor, and that is where silence begins to reign, and the silence continues all the way to the top of the building. Just for kicks, I pull down on the doorknobs of empty suites, and to my surprise, many are unlocked.

You can walk right in and see large fields of empty desks and cubicles and empty corner offices with desks still in them. It is eerie.

People used to sit at those desks and work every day, and then one day it was all over, and they left, never to return. The people who own the buildings see no reason to empty the spaces of their debris until they find potential new tenants, which will likely be a very long time in coming.

Meanwhile, it is all just sitting there. My first thought was that building owners should convert all the unrentable office space to residential, but if you do that, would you lose your anchor business tenants?

And is it even legal to do mixed space in that way? A conversion would require tremendous capital expenditure. It is a catch-22, with no easy solution.

Please allow me to put a pin in this line of thought for a moment and then circle back. My Peruvian in-laws speak very openly about everything having to do with, shall we say, gastrointestinal matters. As an American and a natural introvert, I find the topic taboo and would much rather not hear about it.

My natural inclination is to cringe when toilet jokes begin to swirl around, pun intended, but after 23 years of doing business in Peru, and 21 years with Peruvian in-laws, I have acclimated myself to this genre of humor.

I suppose that I am channeling my inner Peruvian by telling you this next part. I was going into a particular office building just when another guy was coming out. This is the fellow I referenced above, about whom I said there would be more below. We made eye contact as he walked out and I walked in.

He was about my age, I’m 42, with a full head of thick golden blond hair brushed back and tucked behind his ears. He wore dark blue slacks, brown dress shoes, a dark brown woolen sweater, perhaps of cashmere, with the collar of a baby blue dress shirt poking out from the sweater’s neck.

I’d guess he worked in the swanky, marble-floored wealth management office on the first floor of the building I was entering, likely as a financial advisor to high-net-worth clients.

He had that air about him. For some reason, I turned and watched him walk away, up a sidewalk cobbled with pebbles, to a back street that curved away from the main thoroughfare, back to where there were a couple more office buildings.

That struck me as strange. Why was he leaving the building he worked in, and walking away from the main drag where there are shops and restaurants? What would motivate him to walk in that direction? It didn’t make immediate sense to me.

After giving out flyers and talking to folks in the building where that fellow worked, including the wealth management office where I hypothesize the fellow earns his living, I went on to the next building, and then the next.

At the final building on the road, a big white building, stately and sturdy, with silver reflecting windows on the dead-end of a curved street, bordered by forest, I walked in and talked to everybody on the first and second floors.

The third floor was completely vacant, as were the fourth and fifth. On the fifth floor, I walked down an empty hallway, just in case there might be some sign of life up there.

Everybody deserves to get the message about our exquisite Peruvian chocolate and I leave no stone unturned. Just before the end of the hallway, there were restrooms, and as I walked by, our blond friend came out of the men’s room, tucking the shirt under his sweater back into his slacks.

“Hello,” I said. “Hello,” he said back.

His face turned crimson as it dawned on him that he’d been caught using the vacant fifth floor of a faraway office building for his bathroom break. I suppose he relishes the privacy. This is the White-Collar Rust Belt, my friends.

Beautiful, multi-million-dollar structures used as private bathroom facilities for wealth management professionals. I wonder what will come of it.

I have been live-streaming on Whatnot every afternoon, which, as an aside, is a phrase that I never would have imagined myself writing, and I am tempted to go live from an office park to show what is going on so that you’ll know that I am not making it up. Maybe I will.

And, finally, if you find yourself in a bathroom emergency, there are lovely bathrooms on the top floors of empty office buildings that you may want to consider as an option going forward.