When they took away our daily free biscuits and hazelnut wafers from the break room, I was happy since it meant less sugar and carbs in my diet. My waistline was thankful. I'd rather they cut the junk food than stuff like salaries.
I really don't value small freebies anymore, in fact now it's a red flag to me. A small startup I recently interviewed at proudly showed off the free sweets, drinks fridge and pool table in the break room, but wanted to pay me 50k Euros/year for a senior product owner. They can shove those perks up their bum with that salary.
I’m sure some companies do cynically provide perks to try to buy or dazzle people, but I don’t think that that’s the only reason that anyone does it.
And when you cut other things, the savings add up since such cuts never come alone.
Spending tends to go uncontrolled when the company is in the green, and then multiple cuts come all at once when the company is in the red.
By my former place when sales crashed, they removed the color printers throughout the company(amongst many other things) and only kept the B/W ones and I thought that was stupid until they said it saved 22K/quarter which seemed insanely wasteful. So you see, it's never just 25$/year when the cuts come, it's always a lot more.