For Ile-de-France residents, the government’s decision to make teleworking compulsory at least three days a week was good: it was not difficult to find a place in the RER A trains this week.. “Normally, we are often obliged to remain standing, glued to each other. But, this week, I have no problem sitting down ”, says Claire Blachon, project manager at Suez, who goes down to La Défense.
In one of the busiest stations of the RATP network, which usually sees nearly 250,000 passengers pass each day, the usual traffic jams at the escalators have disappeared. “There are a lot less people. At the start of the week, users even came to suspend their subscription ”, says Pires Armando, RATP agent.
Since January 3, the first business district in Europe, which has 180,000 employees, has been strangely quiet. In the morning, only a few dozen executives cross the immense esplanade, which is usually teeming with people. At Société Générale, for example, the 18,000 employees who work in the neighborhood only come one day a week.
In the one hundred and twenty-five buildings which encircle the esplanade, many offices are lit, few are occupied: ” There is nobody, explains a concierge service provider from the CBX tower who wishes to remain anonymous. Barely two hundred employees were present on Monday, against three thousand in normal times. “
” It’s very complicated “
Obviously, the sixty cafes, restaurants and bars of La Défense suffer from this. “Yesterday we served twenty-five covers, before we made two hundred. All the restaurant owners in the neighborhood are worried ”, says Francky Bouiller, owner of the restaurant Le Mond, going to serve the only two people seated in the room.
At the end of the day, when it is time to leave the offices, salespeople in the shops of the Westfield Les 4 Temps shopping center, the most visited in France, wait in vain for the arrival of customers. All the traders surveyed made part of a sharp drop in attendance. “We lost the clientele of the towers, it’s very complicated”, explains François Luu, head of The Kooples brand, which showed a drop of more than 50% in its turnover for the day of January 4. Ditto in the Bexley costume shop.
This difficult start to the year comes at a time when attendance has been at half-mast since the start of the pandemic. At Les 4 Temps, the stores surveyed by the Federation for the Promotion of Specialized Trade show a 40% drop in footfall since 2019. “We are worried, it will be impossible to survive if it continues like this”, explains a manager of the Jules store. Same story with Cultura. “We had regained hope with a super month of December at the same level as 2019. This new halt is harsh”, loose David Rousselle, store manager.