From Bastiat's classic candlemakers' petition against the sun:
We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.
San Francisco liberals are not liberal in the sense of promoting liberty. "Leftist" would be more accurate. In fact in America, neither the mainstream left nor the mainstream right is particularly liberal: both want things to stay more or less the same and are afraid of change, both are conservative in that sense.
I know you're joking but this is CA we're talking about. Everything's fair game for a ban. If you saw a headline that says "Sen. Fienstien calls for ban on water guns" it's a legitimate tossup as to whether it's satire or legit. Banning things is kind of their specialty.
SF should ban continental breakfasts. If you're staying at a hotel and they provide breakfast, we're depriving local businesses of the opportunity to serve them.
But don't forget that free trade and efficient markets are the cornerstone of the American way, and protectionism is tantamount to economic suicide (only when discussing Trump's tariffs).
I see where you’re coming from, but all of these are standard things done in a way or another for the public good. But always in a partial manner, not in the absolutes you mention.
> ban private cars
The standard move is to retire parking lots, increase tax on car ownership in a variety of ways. That helps finance reworking the streets, building better infra.
> ban owning your appartment
You get zoning laws.
> e-commerce purchases
Local tax on online goods.
> cleaning your own home
Shoet of cleaning, the city can impose landscaping standards and mandate registered companies for dealing with building maintenance and architecture change.
That’s the contract you have for living in a society; giving up a fair amount of control in exchange of a community.
1. This proposal is for all new offices, which as usual, creates an amazing unfair advantage to established companies. The old companies will have an old office that can offer the perk of free lunch, whereas new companies cannot.
2. I have yet to go into some random restaurant and not have to wait an absurd amount of time in line. This city constantly feels like it does not have nearly enough restaurant or activity capacity, everything is just constantly crowded, all the time. So now I guess we will exacerbate that artificially? Lunch times will take 1.5x as long without any actual enjoyment from the extra time since it will just be spent waiting around in line for (probably) unhealthy food.
If someone joins a company solely because of free lunch then I would venture to say that's not an employee you want. Salesforce has never offered free lunch and continues to be voted as "the best place to work." The employees are incredibly happy and love the culture / leadership.
I doubt anyone joins a company solely because of free lunch, but I'm sure it's one of many important factors in an area with a ridiculously-high cost of living.
1. Why is it such an 'amazing unfair advantage' to be able to offer 'free' lunch to your employees? Because the lunch is not really free, it is paid indirectly from the salary of the employee; new companies can simply offer more salary instead.
2. Can't companies simply order lunch for their employees? Or pay a third party to serve lunches for their employees in a company canteen?
1. Free lunch may not be free but while it may cost $X for the company to offer that lunch and while they may deduct that $X from my salary, the value of that lunch to me is not $X but, say, 10 x $X because it saves me time going to and searching for places to eat, waiting in line, waiting for meal to be prepared, paying more per meal, including the tip...etc
2. Sure, they can. For example, Google will hire "Totally Unrelated To Google, Catering Inc".
1. By taking a lower salary in exchange for lunches, you indirectly save on food expenses during the day. Additionally, you could save large amounts of money on taxes.
2. They could and probably do already, however that doesn't get citizens into local restaurants, which is what I'm assuming is this law's goal.
This "solution" seems like a combination of regulatory capture by local restaurants that want to avoid competing, and the usual SF Supervisor cravenness / refusal to deal with the root cause of the issue. The restaurants mentioned in the article (Udon place under 1455 Market and The Market) are both expensive and mediocre, which is no recipe for success. Instead of attracting customers through serving a better product, they are trying to eliminate competition.
Around my office in SoMa by Montgomery, there are numerous thriving lunch places. The Bird, an affordable fried chicken sandwich spot, has 40 people lined up outside every weekday, because it is delicious, cheap, and fast. There are plenty of other examples.
The quantity of open air drug use, sales, and other low-level criminality around Civic Center is shocking - it's not an area where you want to spend more time than absolutely necessary. The same group of heroin & crack dealers do business at the top of the BART steps every single day, and the police do nothing about it. The city needs to deal with that first. Perhaps they can spend some of the tremendous tax revenues coming from tech companies, tech workers, and local restaurants on solving that issue.
You’re not reducing competition, you’re increasing profit margins and supply of customers. The market incentivizes more competition to reduce profit margins.
The irony is that while the Bay area is screaming for globalization and free trade, against rising nationalistic trends, city-level protectionism is the norm now and only expanding.
Not necessarily supporting this motion, but it would cause no one to drive to lunch. There are dozens of good options within a block or two of most tech companies in the city. It would probably cause an uptick in Uber Eats, Grubhub, Eat24 orders though.
In mid-market? There is no where near the capacity in local restaurants to support Uber/Twitter/etc dumping all their employees out. There is the Burger King that plays classical music I suppose...
Companies wouldn't be required to "[dump] all their employees out" at lunch. Plenty of people bring their own lunches to work every day, so it's incorrect to assume that every office-based employee would be simultaneously hitting the streets for food.
Now I'm not defending SF officials here, but c'mon. This is San Francisco we're talking about - there are restaurants aplenty within walking distance of most tech offices.
I've seen a few comments in this thread from people who seem to be arguing that every employee who would otherwise get a free lunch at work would suddenly be flocking to the streets.
First, this doesn't eliminate existing cafeterias, it just bans new ones. Second, cafeterias exist for two reasons - pricing and convenience. If, as you hypothesize, cafeterias closed (which is not what's happening here) and everyone was forced to find other options, I would imagine that a good portion of these people would opt to bring their own lunch from home, for those same two reasons - pricing and convenience. After all, why spend 40 minutes in line for a $15 lunch when you can make a damn good one at home for ~$6 and eat it virtually whenever you'd like?
Disclaimer: I do not support the city's decision here, but I also don't think it's as big of a travesty as people are making it out to be.
Again, the Mountain View ban is for a one particular location which has lot of restaurants in the complex. Search for The Village, Mountain View. There are a lot of things wrong with these bans but having to drive to restaurants in not one of them.
(no way in favor of the ban, I like my free lunch very much)
Yes. In the middle of a shopping area https://goo.gl/maps/5AC7tTfhNvs surrounded by lots of food choices with a Safeway, Trader Joe's, Milk Pail and Walmart all within a 3 minute walk!
Next Headline: "SF Residents Frustrated with Traffic From Big Tech Lunch Outings"
Subsequent Headline: "San Francisco Officials Require Tech Companies to Use Postmates"
At some point, San Francisco needs to accept what it's allowed itself to become. I've no affinity for tech companies or Silicon Valley, but if it wasn't for the wealth tech companies, nobody would want to go to San Francisco and it'd be a wasteland. I've never seen more feces or smelled more piss in a single area in any other city. If tech moved out, we'd be hearing about complaints about how "if only big tech invested in poor SF neighborhoods."
It'd still be iconic and garner tourism, but in an economic sense, it'd be a shadow of its 20th century self. Nearby cities like Oakland would be even worse off as a result. Housing would be much cheaper, but the city wouldn't be as bustling or generating that much wealth.
Again, I'm not defending tech companies, but San Francisco seems to lack a ton of foresight into the potential side effects of its decisions; its actions seem mostly reactive rather than proactive.
This won't even solve the problem they're trying to solve. These companies will just order catered lunches. So now you'll have extra traffic in the morning for the extra food deliveries, and the tech workers still won't go outside.
The anecdotal example of a local restaurant seeing a big uptick in business on the day a cafeteria is closed seems to suggest you might be wrong!
Every workplace I've had in SV where we had catered lunches, people were pretty likely to walk a few blocks for a meal instead. It wasn't like working at a place with a cafeteria since you were being offered a choice of 1-2 catered items instead of a huge cafeteria menu.
Why should we prefer that we support people who work at restaurants vs people who work at tech company cafeterias?
That’s what this legislation is effectively doing.
The biggest issue here is the cost it takes to run a business like a restaurant in this city. It’s too damn high. Even right near Salesforce in Soma there is not really that great of a selection of food.. I wouldn’t blame tech for that. I would blame the city and it’s awful regressive anti-housing legislation that has driven up the costs of everything to near unsustainable levels.
Which is exactly the kind of bullshit that Aaron Peskin supports. Hes literally causing a problem, then trying to blame someone else for dealing with the fallout of that problem. Truly a terrible politician for most of the residents of this city.
> Why should we prefer that we support people who work at restaurants vs people who work at tech company cafeterias?
Because restaurants bring a lot of value to the city and area itself. Vibrant restaurant scenes are a key component of a city's atmosphere and an area's walkability.
Then the city should make it cheaper to own and operate restaurants and make the city less shitty to walk around in by cleaning up its streets of shit and syringes. A lot of these areas that have tech cafeterias are just plain awful to walk around in.
You can’t create a vibrant restaurant scene in these areas just by attempting to force people to eat lunch out at overpriced restaurants that aren’t even open on weekends
But was that closed cafeteria replaced with catered lunch or with nothing? If they company pays for the catered lunch then you won't see the uptick.
I too have anecdotal evidence -- when reddit moved and no longer had access to a kitchen, they started bringing in catered meals, and pretty much everyone just stuck around for lunch.
Presumably if this was a permanent rule, rather than a temporary issue like the cafeteria being closed, the company would bring in more variety in catered food.
Do people really think that providing free catered food is in any way, shape, or form the norm (much less an expectation) for companies--even those in urban locations employing well-paid professional workers?
I am familiar with one medium-sized tech company in downtown Mountain View, which used to provide catered lunches from individual restaurants three days of the week, and now uses the EAT Club service three days of the week instead.
That's my reaction but I've actually asked this question of some people who work in the Bay Area and been told it's table stakes in a lot of cases. Hard for me to comprehend and anecdotal, but there you are.
"Two San Francisco supervisors introduced an ordinance last week that would forbid employee cafeterias in new corporate construction."
In all the tech companies I've visited in the Bay Area (all <1000 employees, not the big campuses) they've only ever had kitchen areas and not cafeterias anyway. You can't ban kitchens or refrigerators, surely, so maybe larger campuses being built could just have more small kitchens local to the employee areas?
Also, if their goal is what they claim, why not just use the tax code by disallowing deductions for food and snacks? That'd stop many companies subsidizing lunch overnight.
> In all the tech companies I've visited in the Bay Area (all <1000 employees, not the big campuses) they've only ever had kitchen areas and not cafeterias anyway.
There's no point having a cafeteria (or even space to spare for it!) if it will only serve a couple hundred people.
> Open drug use is still common on the streets around Twitter’s headquarters.
This should be the first priority. If I can't get food from a cafeteria and this is the environment surrounding my office, then I'm just packing my lunch, which defeats the purpose of the ordinance.
It's a little naive to suggest that techies are all going to make lunches at home and bring them to work because of some needles on the street. Many techies don't even cook on a regular basis when they're at home.
I could really see something like France's "tickets restos" / meal voucher system benefitting everyone. Fitting for smaller companies who want to provide a perk w/out an on-site cafeteria, puts some money into the local economy, a little tax relief for employees who are normally buying food for lunch...
I'd love it if tech workers, as a protest, would use Uber Eats or Grubhub or Doordash to start buying food from national chain restaurants and having them delivered to the office en masse.
"OK, sure, we're buying our own food, but we're sending cars all over the roads at peak lunch hour, we're only buying food from large corporations that are headquartered out of state, and we're paying paying other tech companies to deliver. Local restaurants won't get a dime."
I saw an article about this where the author lamented that "SF has plenty of Michelin-star restaurants". Yeah, that's what I want for lunch, fancy restaurant food.
The last thing I'd want is to waste time going to restaurants, day after day. That's what, 30-40 min wasted every day? I could be spending that in the gym! I work with computers all day, every minute of exercise is precious.
It's cool to go out with coworkers and socialize sometimes, maybe once a week, but other than that I just want to gobble down the food and be done with it.
(I don't live in SF or US but I visit every now and then)
The rational provided for these measures is very indirect, and, as such, it almost ensures the interpretation that it is retaliatory. If the concern were truly "integrating" tech workers into the community, perhaps the city would move to provide building permits for large urban housing complexes. Employer owned cafeterias create service industry jobs and are likely more sustainable than catering (with take-out waste). The goal seems more to punish tech workers and compromise a significant benefit to their employment.
It's retaliation, yes, because these workplaces were supposed to bring benefits for their surrounding neighborhoods (and in some cases got tax breaks/etc on that basis) but they're actually bubbles that don't enrich the area very much while contributing to traffic (as employees commute in from far away).
The result of this nitpicking might end up being a bad middle ground in terms of the scope and efficacy of such a proposed regulation.
The knee-jerk response might be to argue against this based on exactly the non-blanket nature of such a policy (i.e. it does not apply to all companies with in-house cafeterias, tech or not, subsidized or not).
The more practical option that takes advantage of the same sliver of regulation is for a few high paid workers to simply incorporate their own eatery or buy out a midsized one and serve X tech company directly for a good rate. Business as usual, as it were.
This second option may seem malevolent but it doesn't skirt any existing business laws, and once they fine tune their selling points (menu, proximity to company, delivery, perks, billing, credit, etc) it wouldn't be infeasible for them to gain the full on contract with those edges over the existing mom+pop competition.
In a grand backfire someone then gets into a multi-branch cafeteria/catering business that just happens to have big tech as their only clients, etc.
At all the offices I've been to without cafeterias, most people end up just bringing lunch and eating at their desk on most days. The hassle and cost of going out for food isn't worth doing everyday, and it's hard to find healthy options other than salad. Because of this, the actual impact of this for local restaurants is probably ~20% of what the naive estimate would be.
There are dozens of solutions to this. City officials are never going to outsmart Google, et al.
My favorite, courtesy of Heinlein:
On each side of the door was a huge brass bowl — filled with money.
More than filled — Federation notes of various denominations spilled out on the floor.
He was staring at this when Patricia returned. “Here's your drink, Brother Ben. Grow close in Happiness.”
“Uh, thanks.” His eyes returned to the money.
She followed his glance. “I'm a sloppy housekeeper, Ben. Michael makes it so easy, cleaning and such, that I forget.” She retrieved the money, stuffed it into the less crowded bowl.
“Patty, why in the world?”
“Oh. We keep it here because this door leads to the street. If one of us is leaving the Nest — and I do, myself, almost every day for grocery shopping — we may need money. We keep it where you won't forget to take some.”
“Just grab a handful and go?”
“Why, yes, dear. Oh, I see what you mean. There is never anyone here but us.”
Here in the USA there is no set time for lunch. I've found taking lunch in the office as opposed to spending extra time traveling to a restaurant and back lets me recharge in less time.
I worked at Amazon in FiDi for almost 2 years and we never had free lunch. It was all part of the "Frugality" core value but I never felt like it was that bad. My current job has lunch onsite and it is better from a productivity standpoint. I probably get 30 minutes to 1 hour more working in because our team doesn't have to do mental gymnastics of picking a restaurant and commuting there and back, but sometimes that's fun. That being said, there are other things San Francisco officials should prioritize over this.
A large amount of company provided free food is catered from local restaurants. I suspect this will cause a decrease in net business because many people will just bring their own lunch instead of eating the free food that the company paid for.
For most food-service workers, working in a cafeteria preparing food is generally much better than doing the same job in a restaurant.
Other than virtue signaling about how much they love local business and small business (this happens on both sides of the isle) what does this accomplish?
This is a prime example of how lobbying will favor a very visible small group of people and slightly disadvantage everyone else.
In the end, when you calculate the economic value of the advantage to the restaurant and the economic loss for everyone else (worker's time, benefit to the company, etc etc), this is a net loss in the system.
"Two San Francisco supervisors move to ban free workplace cafeterias, obviously directed at tech firms. They argue free cafeterias are denying business to local restaurants and (as per Supervisor Peskin) “depriving [techies] the pleasure of mingling with the rest of The City”, which is impossible for me to read in anything other than a cloying sarcastic bully voice. @theunitofcaring has a typically thoughtful and compassionate take on this. I am less thoughtful and compassionate and my take is wanting to start a petition to ban San Francisco City Supervisors from having kitchens in their house. It’s literally stealing from the restaurant industry! [EDIT: Commenter “Jeltz” has made the petition]."
The tech companies had no problem taking the tax breaks. Twitter pitched the benefits to SF as revitalizing an area of the city. Twitter, et. al. didn't deliver on their end of the deal.
I see this as a renegotiation of the deal when one party (SF) has realized that they are getting shafted.
Twitter, Uber, etc can always leave if they have a problem.
Everyone else that works in SF has to pay for their lunch on lower salaries. If the lunch cost is so unreasonable - bring a microwaveable meal or leftovers from last night.
I really don't get why anyone is acting like this is so horrible.
> I really don't get why anyone is acting like this is so horrible.
For me... it's not really about the cost. It's about the time and convenience, and having healthy options.
If I have back to back meetings or a deadline, I can grab and eat lunch from an employer cafeteria in 10-15 minutes. If I have to go out to a restaurant, I'm going to be gone for 30-60 minutes.
Instead, I'd just end up bringing lunch from home. But I can't cook as well as the cafeteria staff, so I'd probably end up bringing in something pre-packaged that's not as healthy. But I sure as heck wouldn't be going to outside restaurants on a regular basis.
That said... the employer provided meals are part of the compensation package for these jobs. So while I don't mind paying for food, salaries would have to adjust to compensate for a lost perk to stay competitive.
And on top of that, it just feels like legislative overreach, without clear benefit, that's just going to make SF even less competitive for tech companies.
> Everyone else that works in SF has to pay for their lunch on lower salaries.
Keep in mind not everyone in tech companies is on a senior engineer's salary. There are lots of lower paid positions.
Because (as someone entirely uninvolved) it looks like an absurd bit of overreach, something akin to mandating that locally-sourced toilet paper be used at all businesses in the city.
Go right ahead, but don't mind a bit of sensible chuckling elsewhere in the country.
There are more important priorities for the SF Supervisors’ time and the law could cause more harm than good (unintended consequences).
More important priorities would be the ones mentioned in the article: the conditions of the street.
Possible unintended consequences: tech company cafeteria workers suffer, people bring food from home, tech companies choose to locate elsewhere, among many others.
> “These tech companies have decided to leave their suburban campuses because their employees want to be in the city, and yet the irony is, they come to the city and are creating isolated, walled-off campuses,” said Aaron Peskin, a city supervisor who is co-sponsoring the bill with Ahsha Safaí. “This is not against these folks, it’s for them. It’s to integrate them into the community.”
So, app developers face the difficulty of having high wages but higher costs, and in every single direction, greedy people are trying to get every dime out of them. I mean $3,258 for 1-bedroom apartments is outrageous! And now, while they're trying to cut some of the few costs they have control over (food), the local government is openly and brazenly trying to force them to spend more money on local lunch shops? Didn't we just read a few months ago about a high profile developer who lives in his car because he can't afford rent? Capitalism with rules that favor greed is pure evil. I'm all for looking for ways to monetize, but you're literally stealing from people living out of their cars.
I've seen arguments that some believe techies are becoming the new societal "elites," and that on-site cafeterias reinforce the divide between elite techies and the rest of society.
To me this seems like yet another poorly thought-out and aspirational gesture with minimal practical effect, but this is San Francisco.
1) There's no obligation for anybody to integrate with the community around them and forcing them to is absurd, especially with the bigger problems San Francisco faces
2) I fucking hate the people that get free food in SF because they think they're better than me and I would absolutely love to see them suffer in the most petty ways possible. I think this hits the optimal level of annoying.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17621174
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613614
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17611770