They're a ripoff, and I predict a decline in coworking as it currently exists, not growth. I'm saying this as someone who is currently working out of a coworking space, though not WeWork at the moment. No, WeWork is absurdly overpriced in LA, possibly in general.

Actually, most if not all coworking spaces are a ripoff unless you've got a small team working out of one. For individuals, it's borderline not worth it if they aren't making obscene amounts of money.

I work remotely and use a coworking space because cafes are dreadful environments for getting anything done. As has been mentioned on HN before, restaurants and cafes have been getting louder, meaning headphones must be used 99.9% of the time. Even nicer cafes have flimsy tables, bad Wifi, and lousy parking.

If space for individuals to work at is really in demand, all that cafes and chains like Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf need to do is wise-up and make relatively minor changes to their existing storefronts or possibly build secondary venues for people who want to get work done, and the idea of managing huge office buildings and paying for them with a nominal $300+ per month fee comes crashing down like a house of cards.

I would gladly work out of cafes and buy drinks and food every day if cafes would fix their existing issues. And I suspect I'm not the only one.

As soon as I get a home with a room I can set up an office in, I'll gladly cancel my membership.

Just want to point out that cafes and restaurants don’t have issues they can resolve by focusing on the remote worker demographic. Their rent per square foot means their whole business is predicated on turnover. They do not control their largest expense.

I would think hotels would be in a better position to expand their business centers and cater to this market.

That's a great point.

I kind of think the more profitable use case for WeWork isn't individual contractors, but instead small teams who want a place where they can work together but it's still too early to lease their own space (or, in the case of existing companies, where they can temporarily expand to overflow space before committing to a longer term lease).

Take a look at Out Of Office next time you're looking for a place to work. We've built a database of free and bookable spaces to work, meet, take calls, or take a break. We've built it for ourselves and for people like you who work on the go and may work in multiple locations throughout the day.

Right now we're only operating in San Francisco, but looking to expand to other cities in the future.

https://outofoffice.app/

Disclaimer: I work for Out Of Office

This is a fantastic idea, and your mobile website is nicely done.

There’s lots of reasons to hate WeWork, but not giving a tour isn’t one of them. If they did that for you and a few others then word would get around that you don’t really need appointments for tours and that would cause other problems. Nothing personal.

what are the problems with showing the place around? literally everyone else is doing that. besides, WeWork once responded to my appointment request a month after the date I requested it for, so they even can't get their brilliant appointment system straight.

> what are the problems with showing the place around?

You and others coming during an event or even focus hours.

Also, I imagine that their willingness to do a tour at random directly correlates with vacancy rate.

It could also be a form of decorum and filtering you out. If they're not hurting for business, they'd probably much prefer clients that responsibly schedule uses of limited resources.

I've never been to a coworking space that wasn't willing to give me a tour when I dropped by.

Maybe wework doesn't like making money.

All coworking spaces I have been to have wanted me to make an appointment, and one did not even let me into the office (which was ridiculous). Maybe this is something which varies by country. And personally I prefer appointments because it makes my life easier to know for sure that they will have someone there who has the time to talk to me.

If they gave tours when their staff had spare capacity to do so and required appointments otherwise, what kind of problems would that cause?

What cost would those problems have to the business? Would those outweigh the lost sales from refusing tours?

That is a fair point. If they are not busy there is not really any reason to not offer a tour. But I can also understand why they heavily prefer appointments. Having random people show up and interrupt your work can be annoying.

It's a communal space. If they see me coming in to an open area as "disrupting" that's probably not a community I'm interested in anyway.

It's not like I was requesting to see a meeting room that was in use.

Appointments are not unusual when arranging for commercial space. Norms are similar to any other professional/B2B environment. I suspect it's a filter. An appointment only process allows the property managers to notify current tenants beforehand; to schedule around shared facility use (e.g. conference rooms); and to research what's available when for how long.

In my mind it's a tell for how future interactions are going to work. Let's say I have a question or some issue with the space, am I going to get to have a normal human interaction or am I going to have to put in a formal request to some automated system and hope somebody responds?

I highly value the first kind of interaction over the second.

Gyms can do it. Is hot desking a bench that much different?

well now it's another reason to hate the we company. I'm sure exceptions are always being made, just OP wasn't able to become one of them. As it stands, a business should have some capacity to take in some walk in prospective clients without scheduling.

Branch offices for large companies are a better use case for WeWork.

Your experience and price sensitivity probably means you're not the target market. Perhaps because it's harder to scale to the scale of WeWork tailoring operations to single occupant clients. Maybe analogous to a hard disk: fragmentation, minimum block size, etc.

It's not necessarily that I'm that price sensitive. In a vacuum I'd probably end up paying their price. The problem is that there are other places that are the same or better at a lower price.

What other options do you use?