Kody Karschnik walks through the darkened office at Sleep Number Corp., laptop in hand, passing a sea of empty cubicles locked in a pandemic time warp.
Desk calendars are paused on March. On one desk, an open bag of potato chips. On another, tinseled remnants from a colleague's baby shower. And, yes, dead plants.
Like everyone at Sleep Number, Karschnik worked from home when the coronavirus outbreak hit this spring. But now, the engineer spends about half of each week in the company's testing lab, making him a rare figure in downtown Minneapolis, where only about one in 10 workers regularly work in their offices these days.
"When you see someone downtown, all of a sudden you are one of the few people in the office," Karschnik said. "Even if you didn't know them before, you wave, you introduce yourself."
In pre-pandemic times, workers flooded back to offices after Labor Day, with children back in school and summer vacations a recent memory. But this autumn, downtown offices are still mostly empty seven months after Minnesotans were put under emergency orders and told to stay home to slow the coronavirus' spread.
A vast ecosystem of businesses and people who support office workers remains disrupted. For the people who come into their offices, the experience is strange on many levels. "It's just so quiet," said Emily Olinger, who works for a small nonprofit and was enjoying a recent lunch outside U.S. Bank Plaza. "The food trucks were always here and it was packed with people."
Getting back to the way things were has turned into a chicken-and-egg problem.
"Tenants in the office towers don't want to come back if there isn't any place for their employees to go," said Deb Kolar, the general manager of IDS Center, the 57-story tower that is the biggest office building in the state. "But if they don't come back there isn't going to be anywhere for their employees to go."