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Comment by kozikow | Hacker News Reader

I and a few of my past co-workers have been suspecting that the facilities team in a big tech company I used to work for had an evil genius plan to reduce costs:

1. Pick the most popular snack (e.g. nachos)

2. Replace it with less tasty alternative (e.g. kale chips) "for your health"

3. Consumption is a few times smaller

4. The company can claim they take better care of their workers and no one can accuse them of being stingy

5. Finance team high-fives each other

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I had the same thing at one of my previous gigs. We used to have (allegedly unhealthy) snacks all the time, then they had some kind of bullshit campaign where they would not restock the snacks for one month and donate the cost to the homeless (fair enough), but guess what happened at the end of that campaign - still no snacks.

That could easily backfire though (healthier chips are usually much more expensive), specially because kale chips are delicious :)

> specially because kale chips are delicious :)

This is OT, but I'm curious: what do kale chips taste like to you? A little sweet? To me, they taste like lemon rind without the "lemony" taste. Just pure bitterness.

I guess there are many variants of kale chips, but never tried one that tasted particularly "lemony". They are indeed a bit bitter, but the ones I buy are mostly a fried something with lots of salt (yeah, like pretty much all chips). I do like its texture and more earthy/complex flavor, which I generally find more interesting than potato or tortilla chips alone.

Plus the increase in toilet paper usage and loss of productive time with all the additional fiber that everyone's getting.

I've tried 3 kinds of kale chips and disliked them all. Then again, I really dislike kale. And I like just about everything. I refer to kale as fart lettuce.

You forgot:

6. Fire the engineer pointing out that the pay of even one member of the finance team during this 2-month project would have paid for nachos for the whole company for 10 years.

If such parasitic behaviour (on part of finance team in this example) is tolerated by the upper management it is better for productive developer to update his resume and spend time on networking and seeking the new opportunities. The nachos are just signs of things to come.

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