Bus service might be more significant in some places, but every place I've ever lived had that subsidized by the government, and long commutes are a toxic thing in themselves.
They've got a bunch of workers who cost them on the order of 1 to 4 dollars per minute. If they can spend a dollar on a snack to get 2 minutes more work out of them, they are making a killing.
Snacks aren't part of your salary for being an employee of your company, they're your company trying to make as efficient use of your work time as possible. By avoiding you walking around looking for your own snacks, by making sure you aren't hungry and therefore underperforming, etc.
The same goes for meals by the way, I can't believe the number of places that have expensive employees go buy food for themselves blocks away... they're literally throwing away money by not having cheap employees fetch it in a single batch.
Maybe the free snacks are there because it’s nice to have free snacks and the boss enjoys them? Does there really need to be a more sinister reason?
I mean, I know at our company that I wanted to have drink fridges with a huge amount of interesting beverages because I enjoy drinking a different drink every day. It wasn’t me trying to improve employee performance.
Of course they have ping pong tables and video games and free snacks and drink fridges. The cost and logistics of putting in a couple ping-pong tables is way cheaper than giving everyone vision coverage, or matching retirement contributions.
"Dental Plan!"
"Lisa needs braces"
"Dental Plan!"
"[in a flashback when Mr. Burns was young]
Boy: You can't treat the working man this way. One day we'll form a union and get the fair and equittable treatment we deserve. Then we'll go too far, and get corrupt and shiftless and the Japanese will eat us alive!
Mr. Burns' Grandfather: The Japanese!? Those sandal-wearing goldfish tenders? Bosh! Flimshaw!
[Years Later]
Mr. Burns: If only we'd listened to that boy, instead of walling him up in the abandoned coke oven."
There are life altering medical conditions that can make you go blind, for that "vision coverage" as part of medical coverage makes sense. I'm excluding that from the below because by "vision coverage" most people mean "insurance for routine checkups and purchasing glasses".
For routine eye appointments and glasses - their is no high unexpected costs that need to be spread out over a large population. The costs are low and predictable. The majority of the population needs them. So the typical benefit of insurance doesn't exist - i.e. you aren't spreading large unexpected costs over a large number of people so they average out to a small consistent cost.
Meanwhile insuring these things just means that the people purchasing the product no longer have an incentive to keep the price down, and adds bureaucracy, both of which increase the cost without providing a better service.
So - why do you need vision coverage?
I'll acknowledge some counter arguments exist. Encouraging people to get frequent enough eye appointments, spreading the cost of bad eyesight to the minority of people who don't need eyeware, if government supported - subsidizing the basic need of eyeware for poor people, etc. You can make an argument in the other direction to, but I don't think either argument is obviously better, and in the end which side you agree with basically comes down to what your politics are like.
I'm assuming your total compensation is the same either way. So it's not that you're not being compensated for staring at computer screens all days, it's just a question of whether your being compensated by being given dollars or being compensated by your eye doctor and glasses manufacturer being given dollars.
You can easily buy prescription glasses online for less than $20 a pair, and you can get an eye exam done for $50-$100
If you use your vision insurance to buy glasses in person, though, good luck getting them for less than $150. The price of the glasses magically inflates to whatever your insurance will cover.
If my vision insurance weren't bundled with my employment as a "free" benefit I'd definitely just use $80 out of my HSA to pay for an eye exam and then buy a sack of glasses online
Or, as I put it in a similar situation, very expensive snacks and foosball games
That boss left, new boss showed up, coffee maker left and an even worse one than the original was installed. No espresso! In SF!
In my experience having at least a VP who actually cares about the perk will vastly improve it. But most won’t care and will do whatever the default is.
Throw out that crappy "perk" and pay me more money.
In numbers it goes something like they can pay you and extra buck a day for not having the coffee machine, but they simultaneously have to cut your pay 10 bucks a day for the loss in productive work being done. Your 9 bucks a day and free coffee down in the exchange.
I don't think meals work in quite the same way. If I'm looking for a snack that is a short-term immediate need. I have a stash in my desk drawer, there are often free ones in the kitchen & break-out area, and I'm happy to use those usually rather than going further afield. It doesn't save actual time because ten minutes nipping to the shop is ten minutes time I'll serve elsewhere but it can impact productive time as a 10-minute break is a more significant mental context switch than a 30-second one.
But at lunch though, is a different beast. I'm going to be away from my desk and/or meetings for at least half an hour, except on those occasions when there is an emergency so I stuff something down myself at my desk from the collection of protein bars and such in that desk draw & work through. Providing a meal doesn't give the company the same productive time benefit there at all, in fact some studies suggest it could be a detriment - taking a proper break for lunch has been shown to have a beneficial effect on concentration in the afternoon. I usually make a point of taking most of an hour to get out away from my desk, even in iffy weather, though I do currently have the luxury of working close to home so I can actually get there, eat, fuss the cat, and get back, in that time so that may not be as appealing to others.
Free food is also tax-deductible in a way that simply giving you the extra money is not.
Donut and coffee clubs (and similar) in offices have worked this way forever.
Perks are things you give me that I can't get for myself, like health insurance which you use collective bargaining to get a lower price on. Snacks aren't that.
And while it's anecdotal, I've seen people take multiple-thousands-of-dollars pay cuts to work at places with "a better culture" where the only discern-able differences were soda in the fridge, beer on tap, and a ping-pong table or similar: all things that if you put a number value on what it's worth to you, aren't worth it. Culture does matter, but it starts with valuing your workers enough to pay them and not use irrelevant "perks" as an excuse to pay them less.
Your office manager (or whoever) orders snacks from a contractor in bulk once a month (they don't make N GrubHub/etc individual orders every day). If they give you your fraction of that back, it wouldn't cover your GrubHub/etc order. Perks work because of these economies of scale.
You can rail against the value of these perks, but "give me the cash and let me decide for myself" doesn't work.
> Your office manager (or whoever) orders snacks from a contractor in bulk once a month (they don't make N GrubHub/etc individual orders every day). If they give you your fraction of that back, it wouldn't cover your GrubHub/etc order. Perks work because of these economies of scale.
What's the economy of scale on me getting up and going to get a fresh salad even when snacks are provided for free, because I value my health and sanity?
Sure, maybe it costs me some minuscule amount of money: if that's your point you can have it. Congrats! You win that argument.
My argument is: pretending that snacks are a meaningful benefit in negotiating employment is a huge loss to employees. But if you want to choose your job based on the snack benefit, have fun working for reduced wages so you can sit at your desk more.
> If you don’t value it, that’s fine. No one is holding a gun to your head and demanding you eat the snacks, but your original proposition was about using that money to buy your own snacks which doesn’t work for the aforementioned economies of scale.
And before that, you said:
> You can rail against the value of these perks, but "give me the cash and let me decide for myself" doesn't work.
Buying my own snacks works just fine, because in an economy of scale, snacks simply are irrelevant. The greatest relevance they have is as a contract negotiation chip where employers try to sell them as a benefit which gets weighed against things that actually matter, like salary.
If you view snacks as an inherently important thing, I guess I can't argue with you on that, but I think most people wouldn't agree with you if they realized how much money they might be leaving behind by considering things like snacks when choosing a job.
> because in an economy of scale, snacks simply are irrelevant.
That's not what 'economy of scale' means.
> If you view snacks as an inherently important thing
I don't, and it's unrelated to my argument.
You may prefer getting $6/wk (or $5.04/wk after taxes) more instead of snacks at work, but the simple fact is that your employer provides snacks because it's in their best interest to do so. Whether it's in your interest is not the decisive factor, though they may take your opinion into consideration.
You seem to be referring to large faceless corporations that are ordering in bulk that way.
- https://naturebox.com/office
You have a bunch of employees who have never run a company confidently telling with their handwaving math how things should work. You have a dozen people patting themselves and others on the back for the idea of getting a sliver of their snack budget back in salary with no concept of economies of scale.
While unionizing for backbreaking work like the manufacturing industry makes sense, in tech it is a nightmare. Let's see where Kickstarter finds itself in the next recession and see how things work out when executives can no longer make quick decisions but are forced to do everything by committee.
Fuck snacks. I do not care about snacks. Take them away. I won't complain.
You might not care much for those perks yourself but it's self-evident that some people do.
I certainly won't hold it against an employer if they provide snacks.
If not, I can point you to a few devs who can tell you from their experiences. ;)
Well, I'll just quote that so you can't change it, and people can decide for themselves whether they think paying thousands of dollars for snacks is a rational decision.
Irrational decisions you've been making for a long time are still irrational decisions. Irrational decisions you make with 1% of your income are still irrational decisions.
If you're saying that leaving behind massive amounts of money in exchange for cheap snacks is something you just inherently like, I guess that's not irrational, but that's a pretty unusual thing to like. But follow your heart!
And even if your partner does it all, "honey would you buy also some crackers" is quick.
You get free snacks at the office for the same reason people sitting at slot machines get free drinks - because someone wants you to stay there.
Also, encouraging workers not to spend time out of the building is not so healthy, physically and mentally.
And it's not meant to be a perk. It's mean to keep people glued to the chair.
There is a _lot_ of sugar in fruit. A medium sized apple has as much sugar as 8oz of Coca Cola.
The sugars in fruit are very simple, which is good and bad. They tend to spike blood sugar very quickly, but also drop back to baseline fairly quickly.
Now, there is lots of good nutritional stuff in fruit also, of course, but you could absolutely develop diabetes from eating fruit.
I genuinely would like to see how strong the evidence actually is for someone getting diabetes from raw fruit[1]. Especially when compared to other sources such as sugary drinks etc. My uneducated guess is that we should be able to look at primates with high fruit consumption and we'd instantly see massive diabetes populations. I doubt this is true. It would be a stretch at best.
[1] I should at this stage assert the non-inclusion of anything processed either. I'm not counting fruit juice for example. Juicing is not the same as eating the actual fruit. Less effort so the digestion process changes. Commercial juices are even worse.
Wrong. This is the complete opposite of what's happening. They aren't eliminating a chore you'd need to do. You're going to work 9-5 whether they provide free snacks or not, and you're going to snack. If they don't provide them, you're going to leave and go get them somewhere else. They're providing snacks to keep you from leaving the office. They get you at your desk longer. It's not a perk. It's a cheap way to extract more labor.
Shortly after IPO they wanted everyone to go on call. The terms sucked bad, the requirements significantly affecting personal time and the compensation for time on call and loss of personal time less than minimum wage for the pleassue. I'd of been better off working minimum wage out of hours given I'd have to loose personal time anyway. The conditions where non negotiable and I was told they didn't need to re-issue contracts etc, I'd have to go on call with no say in it. In real terms going on call was a pay cut with more accountability.
On refusing to go on call, my manager and his manager used the line "What about the free food and perks, take one for the team". It's about the worst thing they could of said.
Free food being a small salad counter / deli bar and free soft drinks non which I utilized as didn't fit my fitness diet and as you said likely only a few dollars per week extra per member of staff for them to provide a few snacks.
After previously being labelled a high performer etc not long after (days) late on a Friday afternoon HR called me in to sign my resignation papers and go on gardening leave.
Some free fruit or something would be awesome for when you're not feeling what you brought or need something in addition other than bloomed chocolate and stale chips from a vending machine that the vendor refills once every 1 week to 6 weeks with no rhyme or reason. The soda machine sells out in 3-4 days and the vendor comes once every 2 weeks if we're lucky. The tap water comes out milky white at first and even if you let it run if you fill a mug and let it sit for a half hour, dump it out, the next day there will be white build up. Do that for a week and then heat the mug and it'll flake off printer paper thick pieces.
I'd totally take free snacks, but yeah I'd be happier with more money.
When I was at OpenAI for a meeting a couple of June's ago I was absolutely floored when they were like "we cater 2 meals a day, you're welcome to stay for lunch" and the guard/receptionist immediately offered me a chilled drink as I was checking in. I was like "wait, did I die and go to heaven?!"
If you want to play the tax game, let's talk about reimbursing large purchases like a vehicle, personal laptop that you aren't monitoring, education costs, or housing. There isn't a situation where I'm going to care about snacks.
Honestly, I'd be tempted to sign up and then tell incoming employees the truth thereof.