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Office Depot is Secretly Testing a Coworking Space by Fortune

“Calling all remote workers, freelancers and small businesses,” a purple sign read at the entrance to the Office Depot on Green Bay Road in Evanston.

Now, Fortune has learned, Office Depot is testing the waters.

The company is in the process of quietly opening three coworking locations housed within existing stores, offering “Hot desks,” conference rooms, and private offices at a steep discount compared to industry leaders like WeWork and Workbar.

Office Depot, which currently trades in the low single digits, has managed to keep afloat after an acquisition by rival Staples was blocked by federal regulators in 2017, but the glory days of a stock in the $40s are more than a decade in the past.

“You have to to use your retail operations to sell some of those services-tech support, copy and print, and so forth-so you want a physical location to have that personal touch.” While much of the company’s current focus appears to be on BSD, which provides B2B office supplies and services to enterprise customers, a year-old push on something the company calls “Workonomy”-an “Umbrella brand” of small business services ranging from tech and printing to shipping kiosks, and now the coworking spaces-could let Office Depot integrate itself into the everyday operations of scores of small businesses.

With more than 1300 stores in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands encompassing 30.2 million square feet of real estate, a serious move into coworking by Office Depot could be huge.

Office Depot is taking a “a test and learn approach,” according to a spokesperson, who wouldn’t share any concrete plans for expansion in the near future.