From remote work to cashless venues, COVID’s effects on business 5 years later

The gathering was a who’s who of Pennsylvania politicos, all looking to share in the credit of a transformational $600 million reimagination of Downtown Pittsburgh.

Gov. Josh Shapiro, Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey and Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato, among others, huddled along Penn Avenue in October to tout the sizable investment that, in part, called for repurposing vacant office space in buildings such as the 44-story Gulf Tower into apartments.

Elements of the project were a result of the COVID-19 pandemic’s lasting echoes.

“Downtown Pittsburgh, like many core urban neighborhoods, was hit hard by the pandemic and has struggled to regain its footing,” state Sen. Jay Costa, D-Forest Hills, said at the time.

Of all of COVID-19’s many impacts, arguably none is more noticeable than the vacant office spaces left in the virus’ wake. However, the empty desks left by people fleeing for the convenience of remote work are but one effect COVID had on the business sector.

Conducting business has changed forever since COVID hit Western Pennsylvania five years ago this month.

Many businesses went cashless. The service industry — particularly dining — was hit hard. Countless workers were laid off, and some never returned to the workforce. Some restaurants found creative ways to stay afloat, the remnants of which still can be found today in curbside pickup.

“Downtown Pittsburgh was thriving before the pandemic. It was very vibrant,” said Geoff Greco, a senior vice president at Jones Lang LaSalle, a global commercial real estate firm with holdings in Pittsburgh. “The pandemic has brought obvious challenges to Downtown.”

The rise of work-from-home

Pittsburgh-based Highmark, PNC and BNY Mellon have brought staff back to the office, but remote and hybrid work has become normalized.

Before the pandemic, about 6.5% of workers did their jobs remotely. In June 2020, Stanford University reported that 42% of employees were working from home following initial COVID-19-related shutdowns. Throughout the following years, those percentages have ebbed and flowed, especially as hybrid work models have become more prevalent.

“The shift to remote work — we used to call it teleworking — was certainly accelerated. The trend toward telework before COVID was increasing, but certainly not at the rate anyone was expecting,” said Christopher Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research.

David Lebel, an associate professor of business administration at Pitt’s School of Business, said about 30% of workdays in the U.S. are now remote.

Hybrid work can come in a few forms, but Forbes reported in November 2024 that “structured hybrid” — set days, hours or time working in office vs. at home each week, set by the employer — has become the new norm. This method is on the rise, with 37% of employers buying in as of 2024.

Lebel said the happy medium of hybrid models seems to be producing the best results for companies when it comes to productivity and long-term retention of employees.

“All of the research I’ve seen, there’s no difference in productivity between all in-person versus all virtual, that’s five days both ways,” he said, adding that productivity goes up in general with a hybrid schedule.

“Humans desire some level of autonomy. They want some level of say about when, how and where they do their work,” Lebel said. “Coming off of the pandemic, when you gave a lot of workers some flexibility, it’s really difficult to take that back.”

A 2024 study from Pitt’s Katz Graduate School of Business found that employees enjoyed having less commute time and better work-life balance with the ability to work from home. It also found significant declines in reported job satisfaction after employers mandated a return to the office.

Chris Howden, 44, of West Homestead is an IT professional in finance who worked remotely for two years after the pandemic began. Now, she follows a flexible hybrid schedule, choosing three office days per week, though policies vary by department, with some co-workers in-office full time.

The hybrid model, she said, works well.

“My preference would be one or two days a week (in the office). When I was working 100% remote for a long period of time, there was a bit of a detachment, not being able to connect with people.”

Her company also utilizes “hoteling” for many of their departments, a practice that has become common across many industries since the post-pandemic return to work. A hoteling space is an unassigned office with cubicles where employees choose or reserve a seat daily. They log into a virtual desktop or connect a laptop to a docking station, and personal items are stored in lockers, Howden said.

She said she would prioritize looking for remote or hybrid flexibility in any new position.

“What doesn’t work is when you’ve got a whole bunch of people who are clinging to one way and refusing to change and trying to apply those same practices to a virtual world.”

What remote work means for Downtown offices

The rise in work-from-home has caused issues for cities, including Pittsburgh, where commercial real estate vacancies remain higher than pre-2020 levels.

Jones Lang LaSalle reported this year that Pittsburgh’s commercial real estate vacancy is 22.1%, higher than this time last year and up from nearly 16% in the fourth quarter of 2019.

“At least in early COVID, we measured financial services and industries like that, which shifted into remote work. What do we have here in Pittsburgh and concentrated in Downtown? A lot of financial service industries,” Briem said.

JLL believes the $600 million revitalization project planned for Downtown — which includes converting 1 million square feet of commercial real estate into residential housing — will boost the area.

Pittsburgh City Council also has extended tax breaks to developers who repurpose office space for residential or new commercial uses.

“Having more residences Downtown and more people Downtown … will in the long run create a more vibrant environment,” said Greco, the Jones Lang LaSalle executive.

Many of the region’s largest employers, including Highmark and PNC, began to bring workers back Downtown after the last COVID-19 restrictions wore off.

“In 2023, Highmark Health asked our designated-hybrid team members to find ways to use the office nearest them at least three days a week,” said Highmark Health chief human resource officer Larry Kleinman. “Since that time, we’ve seen increased usage of our building space in all the markets we serve. We don’t anticipate the organization making additional changes unless business needs change.”

Greco said the employers who had the most success maintaining office space Downtown were those who offered amenities such as fitness centers, conference centers and proximity to parking and public transportation.

“The office has taken on a new meaning for employers,” Greco said. “It’s a space to collaborate, convene, work on projects together, see each other in person and really build that culture within the organization.”

Pittsburgh’s unemployment numbers also have recovered since their largest spike in April 2020. That month, the unemployment rate was 15.6%. Last December, it sat at 3.4%, two points lower than in February 2020 before the pandemic hit its hardest.

With employees scattered, the face of work meetings has changed. Workers became familiar with Zoom, a little-known application before March 2020. The rise of online meetings has sustained, even with employees returning to the office.

Pitt’s Lebel said he isn’t seeing evidence that people are less engaged in virtual meetings despite the prevalence of “Zoom fatigue.”

“What we saw is that people actually preferred to contribute a little bit more, at least verbally, virtually versus in-person,” he said.

Down with cash, up with cards

The rise of mobile wallets already was accelerating toward fewer cash transactions, but the pandemic sped up the contactless payment trend with many large venues and companies going completely cashless.

Acrisure Stadium, PPG Paints Arena and PNC Park all have moved to accepting only credit and debit cards and mobile payment apps including Apple Pay and Google Pay, as have Kennywood, Sandcastle and Idlewild.

Many of these locations are equipped with “reverse ATMs” where patrons can convert dollars into a pre-loaded card.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike is another place where cash is no longer accepted.

Crispin Havener, a Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission spokesperson, said the pandemic played a major role in its decision to go cashless. “This was always part of our plan … however, the pandemic moved the time frame up to 2020. We started studying moving to a cashless system back in 2011.”

They’ve now implemented openroad tolling, which replaces the current cashless stop-and-go tolling method, east of Reading. The system allows drivers to move under structures at highway speeds that will register their entrance or exit on the turnpike and bill them electronically.

When Kennywood and Sandcastle went cashless in 2022, their general manager, Mark Pauls, said it would provide a “better, more efficient experience to our guests.” But detractors abound. Before the pandemic, analyst Jay Stanley with the American Civil Liberties Union highlighted the downsides of a cashless society, including privacy concerns, vulnerability to outages, and disadvantages for low-income individuals. He noted that cashless systems assume financial stability and access to banking, which many — such as the poor, elderly and homeless — lack because of ID and documentation barriers.

Restaurants rebound

When emergency measures were put into place in March 2020, the restaurant and hospitality industries were some of the hardest hit in the country.

Unable to provide dine-in service, and with already razor-thin profit margins — between 2% and 7%, according to Ben Fileccia, senior vice president of strategy and engagement for the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association — many eateries were forced to close or lay off employees.

By August 2020, a staggering number of restaurants — from Pittsburgh institutions such as The Original Hot Dog Shop in Oakland to newer favorites, including Coca Cafe in the Strip District — had permanently closed.

Today, the outlook is considerably improved, according to Fileccia.

“It really went to the resilience of the restaurant industry and the support from communities,” he said.

He said national restaurant revenue in 2024 was $1.1 trillion and is projected to grow to $1.5 trillion this year. In 2019, the total was $863 billion, according to the Nation’s Restaurant News.

Jeanine DeGennaro owns DeGennaro’s Restaurant in Greensburg. The Italian eatery has been open for 26 years — even through the early months of COVID-19.

DeGennaro became emotional while discussing the strain of 2020 shutdowns.

“I run this place by myself, so every day watching what the governor was going to do to us the next day, watching the TV, saying, ‘what are going to be the demands on me today?’ ” The rise in delivery and takeout offerings helped keep restaurants afloat — and those options haven’t gone away.

“That’s all I had at the beginning, and then I was only open for four hours at a time — but I was so busy during that four hours. I had such wonderful customers — they wanted to make sure I stayed around.”

She said she has more pickup orders than during pre-pandemic times, but it has decreased in the past two or three years. Things went completely back to normal for her about eight months ago.

DeGennaro also said she took out loans from the Small Business Administration to supplement income lost during the height of COVID-19.

“It was a hard time, but if you really wanted to make it, you could. … I really had to think outside the box of how I did everything,” DeGennaro said.

Rosann Veenis, owner of La Vita’s Restaurant in Greensburg, did a busy takeout business for the first months of the pandemic, including Easter and Thanksgiving. “My evening hours were all takeout. I never closed a day during COVID, never,” she said.

She had a group of regulars from the Westmoreland County Courthouse who came in to pick up meals, though some would stay and eat — distanced, of course. “We still have the tables set apart,” she said.

Veenis has owned the restaurant for 35 years and said those early days were some of the hardest. Extra expenses came in the form of more takeout materials, as well.

But after about two years, her customers came back to eating in-house again.

Fileccia said pickup, takeout and delivery are still big business in a post-pandemic world.

“A lot of new restaurants are catering to that guest, maybe by making a portion of their kitchen just takeout or reconfiguring their dining room to accommodate,” he said.

The change of the takeout landscape has extended the average person’s delivery options past the standard pizza and Chinese food, he added.

“I believe restaurant employment, at least, rebounded to pre-COVID levels,” Briem said. “It’s back above where it was before COVID.”

He also said there has been a shift from full-service dining — meaning sit-down restaurants — to limited dining establishments.

Adam Rauf, 41, of Point Breeze North, was an avid patron of restaurants and bars before the pandemic. He and his husband welcomed a baby in May 2020, so they took their time going back to “normal” with going out.

Once vaccination became ubiquitous, Rauf started to feel more comfortable going out — but he still was cautious.

Rauf still doesn’t make it to as many eateries as he used to, between raising a preschooler and sticking to the habits his family formed during the pandemic.

“We still do a lot of takeout and delivery where we can,” he said.

After such a difficult period, Fileccia said, it was the support of communities that pulled restaurants through, as well as government funds that kept doors open and staff at their jobs.

“We just learned to adapt,” said Jackie Jaffre, owner of Jaffre’s Restaurant, Bar and Six Pack in Greensburg. “We had to keep changing and figuring out how to stay profitable, stay in business, stay relevant with what people were able to do with the circumstances they were in.”

Like other restaurants, Jaffre’s did plenty of takeout business — and they still do, thanks to the accessibility of delivery apps.

“I think people got used to the convenience of it, so they just continued it. Things like DoorDash have helped immensely.”

Some aspects of our everyday lives have changed and shifted forever, but at the five-year mark, crowded restaurants and bars are a common sight — even if it took a while.

Jaffre said it was as long as three years until things went back to normal.

“I think people tried to come back right away, as soon as they were able to,” she said. “But things didn’t feel normal for a long time.”