Employees will go apeshit. Food is such a huge deal for the culture.
After a few years nearly everyone will think this is the 'regular' Google and won't know anything about the 'old' Google way.
When I was working there, there was a tool called 'percent' that would tell you what percent of the employees were newer than you were. What astonished me was how rapidly one became an 'old timer' in the sense that > 50% of the employees had arrived after you had[1]. I watched this process in real time as people got fed up and left because they felt that the company had "let them down" or "failed to meet their commitments." It was a lot like university where every 4 or 5 years its an entirely different set of undergraduates. You tell them "how it was" and they believe you because, you are there and they just arrived.
[1] That particular astonishment, combined with the reported employee numbers, led to another investigation which was how Google could replace 50% of the staff without anyone noticing, and discovered that churn was a pretty big thing.
Personally, I'd rather earn an extra $25k and buy a few cups of coffee with it than get "free coffee".
I don't think there are any companies that spend $25k per employee per year on coffee???
When you look at the cost of coffee or soda, providing it free may cost the company in the ballpark of $500 a year per employee (though often less) which is minuscule in the total annual cost of an employee. Taken in a vacuum however, the number looks big. We spent how much on Coffee last quarter! When companies get to the mostly investor owned squeezing for growth stage, it's almost always among the first thing that gets cut. This is then usually followed by other more important quality of life cuts like training, equipment, and bonuses. Many companies hit this stage and start increasing margins by letting inflation eat their employee's high salaries over time for instance.
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Paying for perks is a great way to avoid paying a higher salary.
That deal is not on the table, though. For practical purposes, there are few places that someone can work that pay better than Google for a given dev, and those places all probably have free coffee as well.