“We have been asked to pull all tape/dispensers through out the building,” a San Francisco facility directive stated. “If you need a stapler or tape, the receptionist desk has them to borrow.”
Collectively, 401k holders don't have much of a voice. I suppose Vanguard might, but even so, retirement accounts are specifically balanced such that they have less short-term risk the nearer they come to fruition, and Vanguard's motive, in theory, should be to provide me with better long-term gains, not short-term savings at the expense of a worse retirement.
I think I want to see a stronger argument for "the shareholders" … and/or these sorts of (idiotic) decisions (that we see far more companies doing than just Google; cf the McD's article that trended earlier where McD is laying people off while beating profit expectations!) would seem to fall squarely on bad management.
I've read that activist investors have pushed for this at several tech companies and even heard theories that that's what actually kicked off the layoff avalanche.
Are you sure?
If it is actively managed, it cares about a whole lot of things that you don't know about. And if it passively invested, it cares about what the average of the active managers care about.
Running a quick Fermi calculation, multiplying my personal rate of staple usage over the past year by the number of employees at Google we get... $0 spent on staplers.
This may be an underestimate.
Still... here's 5,000 staples for 4.29, with no particular effort put into price shopping: https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/749601/Office-Depot-B... which yields 1.2 million staples for a cool $1000. In reality I'm sure bulk buying could push that down even more.
I'm finding it hard to believe even Google goes through much more than that in a year. But even if I'm wrong, does it go through 120 million staples per year, necessary to get up to even a semblance of one employee's salary?
What an astonishing message to send to stockholders and investors.
Maybe some intern realized they could arbitrage $0 work staplers into >$0 eBay staplers.
As an aside, the organization I worked at before had two to four secretaries per floor. Before the pandemic, most were in their offices when you needed anything practical, like staples, batteries, etc. After the pandemic, most of them work from home most days of the week. That's great for them, but I've had days that I had to go through the whole building to get this or that.
These small informal conveniences and ways-of-working aren't on the organization's radar, and when they're gone, it takes some doing to get them organized again. Until then, and until everyone in the organization knows about the new ways of working, this can be quite frustrating and inefficient.