It's such a simple, easy and cheap morale and productivity booster to give your employees. If there isn't free coffee, it's not a place you want to work because they're skimping on their employees.
As a consultant once on a due diligence gig at a medium-sized quasi-tech company in the Midwest, on the day I arrived, one smart and charming QA engineer took me aside and shared “the free coffee in the micro kitchens is crap, here’s our [employee-provided] coffee pot on a filing cabinet in the corner, please drink as much as you want”. That told me, among other things, this was a decent team in a mediocre company..
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220426-00/?p=10...
(spoilers:) during a collab between Microsoft and IBM, Microsoft engineers were frustrated with the coffee at IBM's offices. IBM refused to let them set up their own coffee pot, but IBM was not allowed to look at anything marked "confidential". so they put a cardboard box over the coffee pot and wrote "confidential" on the side.
I've watched as promising young kids took up the addiction to make their deadlines and end up wired, tired, and burnt out. I've watched fights erupt recently at the drive-through line at Starbucks near my home. It reminds me of my time as a cocaine user, and the way people would fight to get their fix.
I've read that coffee was the fuel that sparked the colonization of the western hemisphere. I've read that when the industrial revolution kicked off, the coffee break was invented to keep workers working.
So these days, when I hear free coffee, I also hear the metaphorical cracking of the 1%'s whip at the back of the workforce. I prioritize my health over my work output. I prioritize rest over frantic action.
Hyperbolic? Absolutely. Stimulant addiction is a real thing. I wonder what human society would look like without it. But I know for certain that removing caffeine from my life has made me happier, healthier, and more able over-all.
Try it -- you might like it!
After a lifetime of consuming caffeine, early in the pandemic when I started staying home fulltime, I saw my opportunity. I'd been trying to quit both coffee and caffeinated sodas for years. I immediately noticed the withdrawal symptoms, but then I'd had them for so long: irritable and dehydrated in the mornings until I had my fix. It took me 6 months to finally ween myself off coffee in the mornings. Sodas had fallen by the wayside earlier. So I finally was caffeine-free on Oct 26, 2020.
It took a solid 4-6 weeks, likely toward the longer end for the morning cravings to really stop. After that it took me another 2-3 weeks for my restless leg stopped moving. It took about 4 months after that for my body to readjust to not constantly shaking my right leg. Parts of the musculature of my hip had over-developed in the decades I'd had that problem. I continue to work on stretching out that part of my body on an ongoing basis.
The real gains started after about 3 months. That's when I noticed I slept much more soundly. Falling asleep remains significantly easier, as does waking. I'm never irritable in the mornings unless I read some awful news first thing -- point being that the caffeine withdrawal symptoms have abated.
I think more clearly. I'm not as easily irritated. I feel like caffeine left me on an emotional raw edge, and I was always snapping at people, or much worse. It ruined my emotional state for the majority of my life, since I started drinking colas heavily around age ten, and I'm 46 at present.
It has really been a very eye-opening experience. I feel like a fog on my mind cleared after a lifetime. I'm not sure I can really relate that feeling with mere words.
TL;DR: ~3 months from cessation I started to notice real benefits
Also during college, I travelled to Australia multiple times to race solar cars. We went as a "race crew", and while I was there to do embedded electronics, there were team members responsible for providing meals to the rest of the crew. They would unnecessarily pinch pennies, and buy the absolute lowest quality bulk anything. It was so bad that I would try to go shopping with them, and offer to pay the $1-2 out of my own pocket to get the lunch meat that wasn't gray, or cheese that wasn't plastic. During the race, someone brought a seasoning salt shaker in my support vehicle to pass around, and it was a massive morale boost! I also started a "beverage club," where folk could contribute to a pool to buy liter bottles of soda when they got sick of warm tap water.
It doesn't matter how good your beans are or how far they are driven in if you are still just making industrial sized carafes of black coffee. The "mandatory" company mug becomes a symbol of control (among others; the company had some strict rules about desk adornments). The "coffee shop" mentality creates the cashier flow and long lines of an actual coffee shop, with the even more awkwardness that any conversations are in full view of your bosses (all the way up the chain) because they chose to subject themselves to this too "for good beans" every morning.
I learned a lot from that job, including how often what people say they want ("quality") is a mask for what they really want ("control"). I'm not sure I'd ever again choose to work for a company where making coffee at home and bringing it in the travel mug of your choosing was a small daily act of rebellion.