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People pass by one of Amazon’s HQ towers in Seattle in January. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Amazon’s return to office five days per week has had an immediate impact on worker foot traffic in downtown Seattle according to the latest data from the Downtown Seattle Association.
According to the organization’s Downtown Revitalization Dashboard, released Friday, the downtown core averaged nearly 95,000 daily workers in January — the second-highest daily average since March 2020 when Covid-19 first took hold.
Downtown’s average weekday worker foot traffic is still 57% of January 2019’s average. But the latest numbers are 9% higher than January 2024.
Amazon moved from a three-days-per-week in-person mandate to five days at the start of the year for its roughly 50,000 corporate and tech workers based in Seattle. The first month of that change saw a weekday daily average of nearly 46,000 workers in the South Lake Union and Denny Regrade neighborhoods where Amazon’s headquarters campus is located. That’s about 74% of the January 2019 figure.
For the small businesses around Amazon HQ, such as restaurants, bars, food trucks, salons, gyms and others, adding two more days of in-person work at the tech giant has been especially noticeable on Mondays and Fridays. Worker foot traffic on those days jumped 22% over the previous month, and 36% above January 2024.
DSA President and CEO Jon Scholes said the immediate difference in the amount of people downtown during the week has continued into February. He told GeekWire that coffee shops are full, lunch spots are buzzing and there’s more activity in the area.
“Hopefully these workers who have returned are remembering what they love about being downtown — meeting up with friends for happy hour, seeing a show, going to a game, enjoying the arts and the things you can only find downtown,” Scholes said.
Seattle’s downtown core has struggled to rebound from the pandemic and rise of remote work relative to other U.S. cities. Many tech companies don’t require employees to be in the office everyday, or have downsized or ditched office space altogether — though others such as Apple have recently inked new leases around downtown.
Scholes echoed what city officials said Thursday in a media briefing related to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan, aimed at building back the city’s core post-pandemic. Bringing back office workers who switched to remote and hybrid work styles is just one ingredient in downtown’s revitalization.
“We also need to build on the trend we’re seeing of more local visitors, residents and guests from out of town,” Scholes said. “Downtown needs to be in interesting and vibrant for all of these groups and we’re making significant progress in that regard and there are major drivers ahead of us.”
According to DSA, downtown foot traffic data is provided by Placer.ai and is based on cell phone location data. Each person is counted once per day.
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