Just came back from a coworking space in Portland that totally missed the mark

I visited this place called The Hatch downtown last Tuesday thinking it would be great for small business owners like me. The price was $350 a month which seemed fair enough. But the AC was broken and it was 78 degrees inside by 2pm, plus the internet kept dropping out every 20 minutes. Has anyone else run into a coworking space that felt more like a garage than a professional office?

3 comments

3 Comments

lee.cora9d ago

Wait, no AC and the internet keeps cutting out? For $350 a month thats basically paying to watch your laptop buffer. Who thought that was okay to sell as a workspace?

brooke4489d ago

Oh man, that's rough. I mean, @lee.cora nailed it - paying to sweat and stare at a loading screen is insane. But here's something nobody's bringing up yet - maybe they're trying to pass as a "hacker" or "garage startup" vibe on purpose? Like, I've seen a few places in Portland that lean hard into the whole unpolished aesthetic as a marketing gimmick. But there's a difference between intentionally rustic and just broken, and no AC with spotty internet is definitely the latter. For $350 a month, they should at least have the basics working.

wells.evan9d ago

Honestly, it's wild how many places think they can charge premium prices for bare minimum service. I see this everywhere now, not just coworking spaces - coffee shops that run out of milk by noon, gyms with broken equipment for months, even that food cart pod that upped their prices but let the bathrooms turn into a biohazard. People are just betting that convenience will outweigh basic decency, and most of the time, they win because everyone's too busy to push back.