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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

Everyone says this. Problem is, no one ever talks about how much money they make. So when Dropbox bumps up your salary, you feel slightly happier in isolation, but it doesn't improve the company's visibility in any significant way.

Contrast this with perks. When Google starting giving all their employees free food, it only cost them $100/week/employee, but everyone talked about it, and how awesome Google's perks are. The amount of positive PR and word-of-mouth that they got out of it, far dwarfed any efficiency improvements they might have gotten by simply giving their employees a slightly higher salary.

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The employees also don't pay taxes on the perks so it costs less than giving you the money to buy the things yourself

Yet as an employee you can't redirect that money towards education, health-care, paying bills, holidays, buying gadgets or providing for your family in general, you know, things that actually matter.

So you get an open bar on Friday and massages. Wow. Awesome!

In the Netherlands, about everything besides coffee is seen as non-monetary compensation and is subject to income tax. Even lunch.

I'm sure the cost of setting up the kitchens (capital expenditure) and the cost of keeping them running (operation expenditure) negate this saving. Are there any published figures?

Well that brings a few other factors in as well.

1. The company can depreciate capital expenditures and deduct their costs from income whereas the employees would not reduce their taxes by doing a kitchen upgrade or going grocery shopping

2. The employees will spend more time at work because the kitchen with free prepared food is there instead of at a restaurant or their house so it technically doesn't even need to break even to be advantageous for the company

1. This reduces the overall cost by some small percentage but I doubt it actually makes it free

2. In theory this is correct, are there any studies that actually show productivity gains for companies in this respect? (I think the real reason for this is because a lot of the valley companies are in the middle of nowhere and therefore it's not really feasible for employees to go looking for food). I recently visited the HQ of my company in Silicon Valley and I was not impressed by how far it was from everything else.

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