Expensify Lounge closure shows we're all rats in tech's maze
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
With its daily champagne toasts and plush perks, San Francisco's Expensify Lounge co-working space always felt too good to be true — and now we know that it was.
What's happening: In a blog post late Wednesday, Expensify CEO David Barrett revealed that the lounge was actually "a little experiment around a very simple question: Can anything bring workers back to the office voluntarily?"
Why it matters: Expensify got its unsurprising answer to that question — "mostly no" — and the rest of us got a demo of the tech industry's compulsion to transform every environment, from the internet to your workspace, into a data-generating Skinner box.
Expensify, which sells expense-tracking tools, opened the lounge to all employees of its customers in April. The lounge will now close Nov. 1.
- With its daily ritual of a 5 p.m. sabering of a champagne bottle, it became something of a legend in Bay Area remote-working circles.
- But Axios employees report that the carousing meant it was not a great place for actually taking calls or Zoom meetings.
Catch up quick: In the pre-digital era, it was expensive for companies to get real information about customer behavior.
- The web made it easy for firms to do A/B testing of alternative marketing strategies, site designs and pricing structures.
- Then tech firms started importing this approach into the physical world.
Be smart: That means any deal you're offered or courtesy you're extended might be for real — or might just be part of some data-extracting ploy.
Yes, but: These experiments still cost money. Someone has to pay for the free cocktails.
- For profit-gushing tech giants or VC-rich startups that may not be much of an issue.
- But in a new era of high interest rates and costly cash, the attraction of real-world tests like the Expensify Lounge might fade.
