A lot of the shopping for clothes that takes place today in wealthy countries, such as the US, isn’t about the clothing.

Rather, it’s the act of purchasing—the temporary buzz of acquiring, and the symbolic value we project onto the item—that is often the point. Then the buzz fades, and a new purchase is made in its place, while the clothes themselves pile up in an overstuffed closet, perhaps never to be worn.

It’s not just a Western problem anymore. A new report by Greenpeace suggests the cycle, enabled by cheap fast fashion, is already emerging in rising economies such as China, where the burgeoning consumer culture has combined with growing incomes to give many their first opportunities to shop for fun and not just necessity.

Greenpeace commissioned independent institutes in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Italy, and Germany to survey at least 1,000 representative consumers from each country about their shopping habits. The respondents, all of whom were between the ages of 20 and 45, were asked details about how often they shop, why they shop, and how they feel afterward. (The US is notably absent from the report, but one of the authors explains that Greenpeace’s regional offices pay for research in their countries, and the US office is currently focused on the environmental policies of US president Donald Trump.)

What the surveys found was that overconsumption was prevalent in each region, but especially so in China and Hong Kong. “In many ways, China is currently leading this trend,” the report states. “Almost half of Chinese consumers buy more than they can afford—and more than makes them happy, and around 40 percent qualify as excessive shoppers, shopping compulsively more than once a week.”

The survey revealed that the emotional cycle characteristic of compulsive shopping—excitement, then an emotional letdown, and ultimately emptiness or guilt—was more pronounced in China and Hong Kong as well. And social media was notably more influential driving purchases in those regions than it was in Germany or Italy.

But “coworking” doesn’t mean what it used to.

Bacigalupo’s shut down New Work City in 2015. Other coworking spaces have adjusted their business models so they look more like providers of private offices. And more recently, they have become outsourcers of office space to big companies. Like many lovely ideas–the sharing economy, to name another–the coworking movement, when it became a business, did not scale.
How coworking grew walls

When Duncan Logan decided to open a coworking business in 2011, he almost asked the landlord to tear down the offices inside the 30-desk space he had rented for the business.

While working in one big open space—a situation ripe for random encounters and spontaneous collaboration—initially sounded cool to the young funded tech companies that Logan targeted, it became old quickly. Soon, startups asked if they could reserve a corner of the space for their growing teams rather than work in the middle. Then, they asked for dedicated offices. Today, almost all of the companies in the coworking office, called RocketSpace, pay for dedicated desks or private spaces.

Across the coworking industry, drop-in coworking space is disappearing. When a coworking company called Alley opened its first location near Penn Station in in 2011, 90% of the space was filled with open desks that anyone could pay to use. At its most recent location, 90% of the space is filled with dedicated desks and private offices. At the New York-based Bond Collective’s five locations, only 10% to 20% of the space is dedicated to open coworking. At WeWork, 90% of space is occupied by private offices that start at $400 per month, according to the company.

Most coworking spaces now have business models that look almost exactly like providers of small offices, such as Regus. They rent private offices on flexible terms.

It’s not surprising that coworking has grown walls.

As open offices become the dominant layout in American businesses, it’s become clear that employees hate them. Workers who toil in open office plans get sick more often, are less productive, and say they don’t like working in an open office. Small companies meanwhile want the security of locking a door, or an opportunity to build a culture in private. Walls make coworking a more broadly desirable product.

Adding walls also makes coworking a better business. Most coworking spaces take on long-term, expensive commercial leases. In the open-desk model, they don’t have any commitment from members to show up and pay for a desk. While a freelancer who pays to work from a space for a day can just as easily work from a coffee shop the next, renting him or her an office creates a commitment. “In a private office, that’s their home,” says Alley CEO and founder Jason Saltzman. “They’re taking ownership of it. So it’s just more sustainable.” He plans to shut down his original coworking space, the one that mostly offers shared desks, after the lease expires next year. “It’s an underperforming asset,” he says.

WeWork has essentially expanded the business started by small office providers like Regus and ServCorp. “Really their best innovation was to make it cool and to make all these people who wouldn’t have been aware of Regus aware of WeWork,” says Charles Clinton, the cofounder and CEO of the online real estate investment company EquityMultiple. “That’s not a business model difference, but they’ve been able to build a successful company with it. I think the brand power is meaningful.”
Outsourced office space management

The coworking industry demonstrated new demand for flexible office space. Now coworking companies are trying to fill that demand for larger companies.

Some newer spaces, like a 12-location coworking startup called Industrious that opened in 2013, have done away with open-office seating all together. The startup rents one- to 150-person offices instead, in some cases building out offices with private entrances for larger companies. A startup called Knotel, which claims in its PR pitch to be “tired of co-working frat antics,” offers “tailored headquarters on demand.” These headquarters often involve building out an entire floor of an office building for a company to rent on flexible basis.

WeWork, meanwhile, says that 22% of its customers are now companies with more than 500 people. It is also building out variations of office management that have nothing to do with its own office space. Recently the company started a facilities management business. It has also said it will build digital products and other services for members.

Some new generation coworking companies, meanwhile, are attempting to merge the community focus that coworking was built upon with these new types of businesses. “I think the concept of coworking has been coopted so that people associate it with renting office space,”says Bacigalupo, who has since opened and closed a coworking space in New York City. But he doesn’t think that walls are the litmus test for whether a coworking space is really just an office rental company. “Whether you have walls up or down in the space, it doesn’t create a huge shift in culture,” he says.

Walls might actually help community, argues Industrious’s co-founder and CEO, Jamie Hodari. They often come with more permanent residents who are willing to invest in getting to know each other. “We see so many customers who are introverts and not necessarily like ‘I’m looking to go to keg parties on Wednesday night,’ and they still find a lot of value in the community, even if they can’t articulate why,” he says.

In other words, even if coworking has evolved to something else entirely, its economically sustainable offspring is not necessarily devoid of lovely ideas.

Source: qz.com