We don't need that to be pre-loaded on the device, do we? how often are they used? and when one is set to be used, the user is definitely online already, just grab the one then
The story is interesting but clearly lacks the most useful parts:
- interview and feedback of people actually using it (since the author says they are not the target audience at the end)
- experience with the shower: does it feel private enough, was it clean, ...
- experience related to other people staying there: could you hear them? were they nice? socializing?
- feeling regarding the small space
I can't speak for this one, but I've stayed in a bunch of these over the years and they're exactly as quoted in the article - better than a hostel, worse than a hotel. Because the rate is higher than a hostel, it prices out the bottom rung crowd, and because the architecture explicitly prioritizes privacy over socialization, the visitors tend to be more respectful of one another. As such, it's quiet and clean enough, although obviously if you are sleeping next to a bunch of other people you may hear some snoring, farts, sleeptalking etc.
Some of these are better sound-proofed than others. Some even have little TVs or radios inside, but I've never found that worse than traffic or construction noise if you're anyway in the city. There's always earplugs.
Shared bathrooms suck, especially if you need to be out during "rush hour" when everyone else also needs to be out, but for a saving of $100+ per night there's plenty of people who would gladly accept holding their pee for a few minutes and/or getting into an already-steamed-up and damp shower cubicle. Most people gotta work 4 hours to make that kind of money back.
When I was commuting back to London for work I tried a hostel in Central London, I think it was about £25 a night 9 years ago. The room itself was clean and 'only' 6 people in it.
The main lobby was nice and a pint was a reasonable price - I sat there after having dinner at work, and read a book, which felt pretty nice to be honest.
The bed was comfy, with clean good smelling sheets.
But there were three issues that meant I went back to relying on friends and family until I got a local job.
1. Someone's feet smelt terrible - so bad it was hard to sleep
2. Someone snored loadly - it was even harder to sleep
3. The shower was grimy. I was lucky to have a ThirdSpace membership so showered there instead
It was a bargain and saved me traveling after a long day of work and having to be social after a very early start to get to London on the Monday. But the better option for me was to find a suitable local job and not do the extra long week commute. (I was also missing my family loads too, so it was never a longer term option for me).
I stayed at this exact location earlier this year. The showers are in individual stalls (felt private enough to me) and quite clean. You could hear other people occasionally but there wasn't any socialising and there's no space for it anyway. Spaces felt safe/cozy (unusually good light/sound design helped a lot I felt), although the lack of any storage/work space makes it less practical than a hotel room for longer stays. The audience was probably 80% tourists and 20% working poor.
The story clearly mentions people who have no such choice but have to go to the city because their work requires it, and wouldn't spend 250$ per night to meet such requirement.
>Workers who moved out of London for remote work are under pressure to come back to the office in the city, and some are choosing to stay in Japanese-inspired sleeping pods
>in 2025, there’s been a sharp recall in remote work offerings with major companies enforcing return to office mandates in London from HSBC to JPMorgan, Amazon, Salesforce and John Lewis.
A typically dormitory with roughly a dozen capsules inside Zedwell Capsule Hotel.
A typically dormitory with roughly a dozen capsules inside Zedwell Capsule Hotel.
Sawdah Bhaimiya
>Zedwell’s Aziz said one of the hotel’s core demographics is young professionals and hybrid workers who are using Zedwell as a “base in the city” due to their flexible working patterns which require them to be in the office for a few days a week.
This is not travelling, it's moving workers half the week to the tube.
I wouldn't worry about fire: it seems to be quite modern so most likely has quite some fire equipment and concrete. Common parts from the pictures don't seem to have much flammable stuff. Last time I stayed in London was in a hotel assembled from multiple old 3-4 floors buildings and multiple old wooden staircases, like to go to your room you had to go to floor 2 then end of a corridor then to floor 3 and right left and stuff like this in 1-person wide corridors and stairs. There I was scared of a fire because there was definitely a feeling of no way to escape fast.
This is not how it works though: a product team shouldn't spend time working on this kind of details while big parts of the product are not good enough.
This is a bit ridiculous in practice. The reality is that products have many, many vectors of experience. Like a house does. If you have a broken window and a leaky pipe, you can hire 2 different people to fix both of those things separately...
Sure it's different teams, but the management at some level is common to the whole house, and if you choose to perfect the paint before fixing the pipes, it means something
The author mostly write about average startup work, not about industries or more constrained environment. A good example of this is the sprint thing: you can do whatever pace you want when you work on your own product that is a web product, but as soon as you work on something with hardware or marketing, you can't just use random deadlines.
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