Google spends $72 Million on Food

A lot of people choose to work at Google over working at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Yahoo, etc. Let's face it, if you can get a job at Google, you can get a job at most of those other places. But, Google pays a lower salary than all of those places for the same position. The way they make Google a more attractive place to work is all of the other non-salary compensation and the general vibe.

Even if they spend $30/day/employee on food (I was also shocked by the snack cost alone, which I've heard from folks inside Google...all those $3 juices and such add up fast), it's still not all that big of a deal compared to the thousands they don't spend on salary.

Likewise for the dual monitors, Steelcase Leap chairs, and the ergonomics team that Google employs to keep their employees sitting and working comfortably for longer hours.

All of this stuff probably comes close to making the cost per employee as high as Microsoft, Yahoo and Sun pay...and yet, Google still gets first pick of the best talent. And it's not because Google employees get to work on cooler stuff--they don't. A large percentage of Googlers work on really boring crap. Building tools to sell ads and scaling them out to a massive scale is probably not an exciting development job.

Everybody at this point is probably wondering why MS, Yahoo, and Sun don't just start doing all of the stuff that Google does, and make their workplace as cool and attractive as Google. They can't, of course, because they'd have to lower salaries for everyone in order to open the budget for it (or lock everyone into their current salary for the next couple of years and eat the losses until inflation catches up). And, of course, that would lead to a mass exodus...because nobody will accept a pay cut.

Say what you will about Google, but the whole food+massages+snacks+etc. thing is genius on a whole new scale from the recruiting and employee satisfaction perspective. And, since they make $1 million per employee (a number beaten only by Exxon and a few others) they can afford to spend a few grand each year shoveling food into their employees to keep them feeling fat and happy.

Google's cafes are so efficient so I wonder how much the labor really adds to the cost. You have chefs and line workers that could work in a high-end restaurant, so salaries are higher, but it's all set up for maximum throughput, so perhaps that makes it cheap.

For example, at Yahoo's cafes, there's a lot of made-to-order stuff. You end up waiting up to 10 minutes sometimes, and there are lineups. Everything at Google is premade food done buffet style, or self-serve, like a sandwich bar. At Yahoo I have waited for a long time for someone else to make the sandwich, and sometimes that person doesn't speak English well enough for me to make her understand that no, I don't actually want meat in the sandwich.

The Google taqueria is made-to-order, but that is run like an assembly line and you add your own condiments at the end.

In the boldest move, Google does away with the checkout line too, which makes throughput incredibly fast. Finally, for whatever reason, Googlers are more conscientious about cleaning their plates before returning them to the cafe. Yahoo has the same sorts of prominently placed garbage cans, but nobody seems to use them.

The only reason that getting food at Google might take you more than 3 minutes are

a) lines -- a growing problem

b) indecision because everything looks so great.

Caveat: this is my experience circa 2005-6.

I had lunch at the Googleplex yesterday and thought, "All big companies should do this." Maybe small ones, too.