Office Building and Commercial Facility’s other subclasses

[gregfowlerphd]

The definition of ‘Commercial Facility’ reads:

A Facility that is designed for buying and selling goods and services, especially on a large scale.

There are a number of issues here.

First, as stated, the definition makes it sound like it’s the facility itself that does the buying and selling.

Second, the relationship between buying and selling and office buildings appears to differ from that between buying and selling and the instances of CF’s other two subclasses: Grocery Store and Shop. In the case of a grocery store or shop, the buying and selling occurs within the facility (and the facility is designed as such), whereas the same needn’t be true of an office building.* This makes me worry CF’s definition relies on an ambiguity within the phrase ‘designed for buying and selling goods and services’ (which could, perhaps, be remedied by spelling out the different ways a commercial facility can be designed for buying and selling and reformulating the definition in those terms).

Third, I’m worried that there might be another ambiguity at play. Office buildings are typically “commercial” in the sense that they’re commercial properties--i.e., ‘real estate… intended to generate a profit, either from capital gains or rental income’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_property). (Although not all are, since the US government owns office buildings where federal employees work.) Grocery stores and shops, on the other hand, are “commercial” in the sense that they’re where commercial exchanges actually occur. These two meanings of ‘commercial’ appear to be conflated in grouping office buildings together with grocery stores and shops under one and the same Commercial Facility class.

Love to hear what other folks think here.

*The most salient sort of buying and selling one might be concerned with in the office building case is of an office worker’s labor to the company they work for, but it’s clear this buying and selling needn’t occur in the building (nor need the building be designed for them to so occur).