Why do they need to go through it? free soda will always be a tiny expense in relation to everything else.
Sure 10K sounds like a lot of cash for soda, but a company with 50 employees is spending millions on salaries.
Sure 10K sounds like a lot of cash for soda, but a company with 50 employees is spending millions on salaries.
This, by the way, is the very definition of bikeshedding. Everyone knows about soda; everyone has bought it before. So cutting out soda is something that the entire executive team feels competent to discuss -- unlike, say, the efficiency of the QA department's staffing schedule, or climate control zones, or the use of electricity for lighting offices at 3am, or the difficult politics of downsizing particular business units. Soda is a simple theatrical stunt for making the CFO look good. It's a good show.
Of course, as Steve points out, it sends a very clear message to the people who've been drinking those sodas: Your work is no longer considered an investment in the future. Now you're a cost center.
Most "I will work harder" types at startups just kind of know when the pigs are trading them to the glue factory for a case of whiskey.
Nailed it.
It's my personal observation. Of course, it's probably different here on the prairie (Kansas City) than it is in The Valley. Maybe the Oracles, ciscos, Googles and Yahoos of the world still provide plenty of goodies for free out there.
I agree with many others in this thread that expenses are expenses. $16 per person per month is $10k at 50 employees. What about the 18-kilohuman corporation I work for right now? $16 per head per month turns into a $3.5M line item per year at that point. When does free soda become impractical?
Also, the original article posits that it's more a symptom of the culture change than anything. Having to rifle through your pockets to score that Mountain Dew that used to fall out of the machine with only a button-press is often the first tangible effect of that culture change.
It's almost nothing and it's definitely not something to try to spend time cutting.
Personally, I hate working in places with these kind of perks. I think they're abused by both management and employees. If your salary isn't enough to cover your personal needs, free soda doesn't solve the underlying problem.
Not spending on soda gives them what? 3 more hours of runway before going out of business?
The crucial point here is that every minute management and/or engineers are thinking about soda, is a minute wasted. A classical case of "penny-wise, pound foolish".
This probably the most often forgotten argument in favor of freebie snacks: time/attention saving.
A good engineer can easily cost a company $1/minute (and be worth much more). Even if going out to ones car to grab some change takes 2 minutes, that $.50 soda just got a 400% markup. Actually having otherwise productive employees think about this as an issue is an even greater waste of talent.
In a large enough company, though, the ratio of dead weight to productive people, can be high enough that charging for soda isn't a false economy.
(It helped that there were three truly excellent cafes and a bunch of so-so ones within walking distance; this wouldn't work in, say, Silicon Valley.)
Notwithstanding my original comment, I make a point of leaving for lunch, even if there's food paid for by the company, including if I partake of the food itself. The break is important.
However, for some things, like an occasional small snack or a bit of caffeine-sugar water, it would be both a waste of time and of money to go out. Arguably, fiddling with a "free" coffee machine is also time-wasting.
For some, the severity of the interruption is more significant than the length of time or quantity of money involved. The variance in working style makes any one-size-fits-all policy questionable.
If your former boss made it very easy to get reimbursed for those trips out for coffee, his reasoning would carry more weight.
Do you have evidence for this assertion? I thought it was fairly well established that most large companies in mature industries are usually quite efficient due to various economies of scale.
(That said, large companies have a tendency to remain more efficient than the alternative by putting up artificial barriers to entry. For example the difficulty of negotiating access to patents makes large companies more efficient than possible competition, but the extra efficiency is due to solving an artificial problem.)
Large companies have economies of scale in the operational/business sense, but they're terribly inefficient in the people sense.
We don't get free anything where I work, and I'm fine with that. My company's job is to make more money, not baby me with things that I'm perfectly capable of paying for on my salary.
I work at an aircraft company. While I'm a salaried employee, the effects of the union being present at this site hit everyone. It's nice in some cases (benefits), but often it really screws us (hard to lose ineffective employees, no little 'fringe' benefits, etc). I'd be surprised if most companies w/ union involvement are much different.