Temporary office spaces have been a thing in a lot of places for a long time.
I have no idea about your town in particular, but there's a company called Regus who have a presence in the US, UK, France, Australia, Singapore, Japan ... actually according to their website they're in 120 countries.
They are not cool. They are not new. They have not spun themselves a reputation of being an awesome, new, disruptive, special, fun, aspirational, Silicon Valley tech-adjacent service like WeWork did. But if you want an office or a meeting room for a day or a week or a month, they can do it.
Having used their services in the past, the rise of WeWork was massively surprising to me. It was touted as disruptive, as new, as amazing! It's gonna be huge! But there are already these boring companies doing this exact thing, boringly, making money but hardly earth-shattering. I guess it's testimony to Neumann's charisma as much as anything else.
A lot of places do also have more casual co-working spaces. Worth looking to see if there's one near you. You mention coffee shops - in Southampton UK, where I lived pre-pandemic, one of the coffee shops took the initiative to open a co-working space on an upper floor. Which would have been a great business move if the pandemic hadn't hit and f*cked everything.
(edit - I am rate limited so cannot reply below, but I wanted to add that I have used Regus in Australia as a private individual with a credit card. Obviously I don't know how it works in every country, but here it seems to be very easy)
WeWork pushed incumbents like Regus to simplify the onboarding process.
In the olden days, getting a Regus desk required an office tour appointment, followed by paperwork. Now they have an app, and nobody needs to send or receive a PDF.
I have no idea about your town in particular, but there's a company called Regus who have a presence in the US, UK, France, Australia, Singapore, Japan ... actually according to their website they're in 120 countries.
They are not cool. They are not new. They have not spun themselves a reputation of being an awesome, new, disruptive, special, fun, aspirational, Silicon Valley tech-adjacent service like WeWork did. But if you want an office or a meeting room for a day or a week or a month, they can do it.
Having used their services in the past, the rise of WeWork was massively surprising to me. It was touted as disruptive, as new, as amazing! It's gonna be huge! But there are already these boring companies doing this exact thing, boringly, making money but hardly earth-shattering. I guess it's testimony to Neumann's charisma as much as anything else.
A lot of places do also have more casual co-working spaces. Worth looking to see if there's one near you. You mention coffee shops - in Southampton UK, where I lived pre-pandemic, one of the coffee shops took the initiative to open a co-working space on an upper floor. Which would have been a great business move if the pandemic hadn't hit and f*cked everything.
(edit - I am rate limited so cannot reply below, but I wanted to add that I have used Regus in Australia as a private individual with a credit card. Obviously I don't know how it works in every country, but here it seems to be very easy)