Well I do get why so many finance people think that way, it just makes me sad that they're the ones calling the shots.
Well I do get why so many finance people think that way, it just makes me sad that they're the ones calling the shots.
PE is all about giving a temporary boost to stock price and cashing in quickly before the long term damage becomes apparent, mixed in with a healthy disdain for the people who do all the actual work.
That works out to $38 per person per day. That's a LOT. It should be maybe 1/10 that considering that not everyone will eat the food every day.
Those numbers are from several years ago, so it's plausible that Yahoo needs to pay more per employee now.
There are certainly ways to do cheaper foodservice, but probably not many ways to do Google/SV-quality free employee food for much less.
* http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoos-free-food-budget-5000-... * http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/4/googles-ginormous-food...
may be they brought me into a wrong cafeteria :) - when i went for an interview at Google, the food was so-so, and in no way beating a $10 lunch at a typical commercial place (and even less so a $20 lunch at a restaurant). A colleague of mine went there recently for some business meeting - the same impression about the food.
My guess the $108m includes other things than just food.
Then add in snacks and drinks, which come out to a few dollars a day per employee, including stocking costs, running the coffee bars, etc. That's a few drinks from the fridge, a coffee or two, a few bags of snacks a day.
And I don't know anyone working at any SV tech headquarters who don't eat the food every day. Personally I've maybe eaten not at work for breakfast and lunch...10 work days in the past year?
While the HQ gets economies of scale, smaller offices are more expensive. Y! SF catered for a long time before finally also switching over to Bon Appetit. Y! NYC provided a daily seamless stipend before they finally built out the in-house dining area.
Add in non-full time contractors as well, who generally get the eat at the cafeteria as well.
Bon Appetit is a standard, albeit higher end, food services company. They serve colleges as diverse as Cornell, Oberlin, the College of Idaho, Lewis and Clark, etc. It's the same company used by Google, Oracle, and eBay. It's hard to describe them as over-priced and overly-luxurious.
Providing a cafeteria is fine however not charging for the food in the cafeteria is another thing. It's seen as excess when things aren't going well. It's ignored or possibly thought of positively when things are going well. A similar but different example is private jets. Always get chopped when things are bad. But they have value for sure. Executive time is important and it's not just the luxury as is often thought by outsiders.
It doesn't take free food to make employees happy and productive if they are already earning good salaries.
Hell, even NBA teams have cut down, and all or almost all of them now fly chartered airline (mostly Delta).
Same 'red carpet' experience though not all the luxury and trappings, and this is for a group of people typically making between the group $100-200M a year.
The only difference is the need for a corporate jet is short-notice travel (in which case, there are cheaper options than outright ownership), versus the major league team's more scheduled transit.
$38 a day per person for what should be a company-wide catering concession is unusually generous.
Meyer generally seems to have made some hard-to-justify spending decisions.
She won't be the first or last CEO to go on a spending spree - see also Autonomy, etc. But the usual idea is to get some value from the shopping trips. If that's not happening, it's a strong signal that the CEO isn't shopping with clue.
I think the board could have been much more critical of the Polyvore deal in particular.
I read in a PE deck once that they saved nearly a million a year during restructuring by swapping out organic chicken in the cafeteria with regular chicken
It's only two examples, but I think it's more than a coincidence. Also, those two companies seem to have more stable workplaces for employees. Yahoo seems to be a mess over the past decade.
Wut?
Providing employees with pay commensurate with the market and their abilities is step 0.
They can buy their own damn food.
Is this really the level of entitlement people have now? Because it's pretty impressive... I mean, why stop at just food and transportation? If employers need to provide "basic necessities" to be a "successful business venture", why not include dormitories? Free clothing? Healthcare services?
However, if the company is paying for the food it's presumably with pre-tax dollars for the both of us.