Or are these people working for companies that provide food or something. I just don't get it.
It's simple. I work at Google, but this answer works for many other companies as well. Prior to COVID I would eat an average of 13 meals per week (and snacks) at the office. Now that I'm eating all of those at home, my grocery bills have shot up.
Also, I’m busy working, so I don’t actually have time to cook my lunch, so it’s either eating something frozen, which is unhealthy and gets old, or get delivery, so that $30 for a meal.
Also, my commute is a fifteen minute walk, because I absolutely optimized for not having to drive anywhere. The only benefit to wfh was seeing my kid more often, but that had its own caveats because it is hugely distracting. So, it’s cheaper and more productive for me to be in the office.
The only reason I’d want to work from home was if I wasn’t actually working, and my bet is many people see it as exactly that.
It's this. Companies started offering food to keep their employees in the office longer. That people here are saying they prefer eating at work due to the cost shows it worked.
Preparing food means getting ingredients, tracking expiration and making and storing leftover food.
In some ways this is wonderful, in others it is a huge time and energy sink compared to eating at work.
Spoiled food wastes more than money and it happens easily.
You can buy prepared food for home via takeout or frozen but those have their own problems.
Totaling up gas and mileage and food and tolls, commuting to the office is going to cost me on the order of $500-1000 a month that I'm not spending now. Just the extra time that I'd need to spend getting ready to go to work and then commuting works out to an entire extra work week of time over the course of a month.
It’s be cheaper out in the suburbs, but even then it might be another few hundred a month.
I’m surprised that people are talking about things like electricity costs when real estate costs are so much higher.
At the office, maybe, but definitely not working.
For dinner, the set times provide natural day boundaries with a strong incentive to wrap up by a certain time. During lunch, it may be saving some time that people wouldn't work by doing away with the need to get to and wait for a restaurant (if the company wouldn't provide any cafeteria at all; every place where I worked had one, usually paid and lunch-only though).
I believe that companies provide food because it's a relatively cheap perk providing a lot of value that simply cannot be replicated.
If I have to make my own food, I have to grocery shop, cook, and do dishes, all of this done inefficiently at small scale and out of my own time. At a buffet-style cafeteria, you just walk in, grab food, eat, drop off your dishes, done. The real value isn't the free food. It's the convenience that comes with it.
At the same time, it doesn't cost the company that much. Raw ingredients aren't that expensive, and neither is running a cafeteria if everything is prepared at scale.
Even if you ignore the cost, restaurants (including buffet style ones) can't replicate that convenience: They aren't at a place where you are anyways, and payment adds extra friction. A la carte restaurants are right out because of the wait. And even if the food actually did make people stay longer - I bet that time is made up by not having to do chores to feed yourself.