The price of fuel is forcing people to change the way they work. Remote Office Centers solve the problem created by the high price of fuel. This is an opportunity for commercial real estate management companies.

The cost to convert a property into a Remote Office Center is pretty minimal. Workers need office space, internet and phones. Advertising can be handled by putting up a billboard on a busy commuter road way that says: Tired of the high cost of fuel. Work out of a Remote Office Center and skip the commute.

There is a free web site for finding and listing Remote Office Centers: http://www.remoteofficecenters.com

Add to that, we have c-c-c-c-cold winters too!!!

By July we will be at $5 a gallon and up unless some miracle
happens and/or the market finally crashes in early fall.

Already the low wage earners are losing the battle.
They don’t usually drive new fuel efficient cars but basically any old
clunker that runs and can be bought for cheap and manages to
pass the smog one more time.

Being on minimum wage means you pretax earnings per week are $320
if you are lucky and actually can work 40 hours a week.
All major grocery outfits (aka Belair, Savemart, etc.) have reduced their
hours. Even people that worked for them for years are now on part time
with as little as 24 hours a week. Add to that a commute of even just 10
miles to get to work and you wonder why I see people in tears because getting called in to work for just a 4 hour shift isn’t worth the price of gas in the long run.

It does make a difference when your monthly gasoline bill all the sudden
starts to go in the 100’s of dollars and effectively has doubled within the last two to 3 years. If you don’t have a buffer and can’t reallocate funds from another expense that can be cut in favor of the gas bill you are in trouble.
I don’t see wages going up and to make matters worse groceries arent exactly cheap anymore either. Where will it end? The jobs created are in the service sector and that means low wages and competing for the entry level jobs that used to give our teenagers a little spending money are now seniors that are trying to supplement their social security checks.
Employers that offer health care once again will break the bad news to their employees this month:
Guess what, the premiums for your health plan are going up starting July 1st
but we can’t give you a raise because the cost to run the business has gone up too high and we are lucky if we break even. Amazing how Kaiser P. keeps building these huge hospitals…

The good thing about Chicago is that the city itself is stuffed with neighborhoods where you have great transit and retail, and we also have densely-knit, small-town-type “railroad” suburbs like Evanston ( a city in its own right, really), Wilmette, Des Plaines, and Oak Park.

The bad thing, though, is that about 4 million of Chigoland’s appx. 9.5 MM denizens live outside Cook County, and a substantial portion of Cook’s residents live at the outer edge of the county. These places are impossible to negotiate without a car, and the prices of housing out there relative to the city make them attractive to the very class of people who most need to be close to town and work, and who are most likely to make lower-middle incomes. I really fear for these people. They are being decimated by the scissors of fuel prices and food prices. I don’t know how they cope.

At least gas is a little cheaper out there- just over $4. But it’s $4.59 around the corner from my office and close to my apt. City residents who have to drive down to the other end of the city, into the bungalow belt neighborhoods that have really unreliable transit, are suffering, especially since they have to burn so much just sitting in hellish crosstown traffic.