Since the summer, I have been using the lunch line at Jimmy the Greek (in First Canadian Place) as a crude measure for the reopening of the CBD in downtown Toronto. It is partially a joke. Those of you who know me will know I am a fan of Jimmy the Greek (and large filling lunches in general). But at the same time, it is a probably a fairly decent (but again crude) proxy for the utilization rate of the offices that sit above and around Jimmy. Pre-COVID the lunch lines were always long and there was usually nowhere to sit. In the spring of this year, I was often the only person there, single-handedly keeping Jimmy alive. But things picked up throughout the summer months and there was a significant spike this week, following Labor Day (see above tweet). This was the spike that many/most of us were predicting and it showed through in the Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index.

Envoy, which is a workplace platform that offers products such as these, recently used its data to publish a kind of return to work index. More specifically, they used millions of anonymized employee and visitor sign-ins from their platforms to figure out who was returning to the office. Their dataset covers over 14,000 locations and all 50 states. And what they found was what you see at the top of this post, which is a look at workplace foot traffic in the top 10 US metropolitan areas compared to a May 2020 baseline. On average, traffic is up over 200%. And for some metropolitan areas, like the Philadelphia metro, it is up over 360%. There was a blip around January, but I think the trendline here is pretty clear.

Since the summer, I have been using the lunch line at Jimmy the Greek (in First Canadian Place) as a crude measure for the reopening of the CBD in downtown Toronto. It is partially a joke. Those of you who know me will know I am a fan of Jimmy the Greek (and large filling lunches in general). But at the same time, it is a probably a fairly decent (but again crude) proxy for the utilization rate of the offices that sit above and around Jimmy. Pre-COVID the lunch lines were always long and there was usually nowhere to sit. In the spring of this year, I was often the only person there, single-handedly keeping Jimmy alive. But things picked up throughout the summer months and there was a significant spike this week, following Labor Day (see above tweet). This was the spike that many/most of us were predicting and it showed through in the Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index.

Envoy, which is a workplace platform that offers products such as these, recently used its data to publish a kind of return to work index. More specifically, they used millions of anonymized employee and visitor sign-ins from their platforms to figure out who was returning to the office. Their dataset covers over 14,000 locations and all 50 states. And what they found was what you see at the top of this post, which is a look at workplace foot traffic in the top 10 US metropolitan areas compared to a May 2020 baseline. On average, traffic is up over 200%. And for some metropolitan areas, like the Philadelphia metro, it is up over 360%. There was a blip around January, but I think the trendline here is pretty clear.