The return of the downtown office worker?

While more than half of America’s workforce continues to ply their trades at home for at least part of the week, Monday-through-Friday traffic counts in U.S. downtowns in February indicate that their office time is on the rise.

A report from Springboard, a provider of shopper traffic counting and artificial intelligence to retailers, found that retail traffic in American cities went up by 30.6% at breakfast time and 19.2%  at lunch time compared to February 2022.

The average annual increase over other parts of the day was 18.3%.

Downtown traffic across the country was 22.4% higher than it was last year, reported Springboard, which noted that crowds still remained 22.6% lower than they were in 2019, prior to the pandemic.

Results in the nation’s biggest downtown, Manhattan, were close to the national averages with a year-over-year February count that was 28.9% higher. Breakfast and lunch time tallies in New York were up by 30.4% and 25.1%, respectively.

“This demonstrates that while hybrid working is now very much established, a greater number of employees are now returning to the office,” said Diane Wehrle, Springboard’s marketing and insights d