The logic seems pretty easy: it was so limited in availability that it benefited very few workers.

So very few people will miss it.

It would be a totally different situation if this were a perk where there had been plenty of supply, so that it actually met employee demand.

It probably annoyed the huge majority that got rejected - probably created a lot of resentment

What's hard to grok? Its capacity was 300 children, so fewer than 300 families at a location where there could have been thousands of families that could have benefited. It served an insignificant fraction of the employees at Google who could have used it.

No inside knowledge but: day care everywhere in the Bay Area is in high demand but is so very expensive and needs to be _more_ expensive. Caretaker ratios are fixed by law, so your main expense is labor, of a relatively low skill variety. And that is where workers have seen impressive gains in wages lately, putting a real squeeze on daycare businesses. It's a real "losing money but making up for it in volume" squeeze.

Daycares don’t scale like other perks. It’s possibly hugely impactful but for very few employees.