htmlfan

As a Mountain View resident who has to drive on Shoreline, please no! This would be disastrous. It's already a mess at 9 a.m. every day thanks to Google. I have to leave to get to work super early just to get on the freeway before the Google traffic makes me drive a 1 mile stretch in 1/2 hour.

Can everyone in this thread stop assuming Facebook employees are rich? There are plenty of non-engineering employees who make $50K for example and the free meals offer a huge benefit to them and even their families.

Where have you worked?

Yet they keep raising taxes?

Maybe I would rather eat in and leave early to go exercise or kayak in nature?

This can definitely help support local business. But seems unfair to lower-salary employees. As an employee who used to have free lunch and now doesn't, I have felt the financial effects.

Dining out truly can make a big impact on the wallet- $10 dollars per meal (unlikely in Mountain View unless fast food) x 5 meals a week x 48 weeks a year (let's be generous and assume you get that much PTO) = $2,400 annually

Company-provided meals also tend to provide healthy options which can be expensive to purchase outside of work- and tend to contain less sodium and sugar than restaurant foods.

I can see this potentially benefitting the local business of 'Amazon WholeFoods' and Costco as people buy more groceries to bring lunch to work with them and eat at their desks. Eating out every day is expensive.