I'm pretty sure in the Bay Area most larger tech companies cargo-culted offering employees free fruit (and sometimes vegetables / crudite) -- the argument being that having employees eat these instead of bagged chips/candy would reduce your health care spend in the long run.
Am I wrong in thinking that this sounds sensible? I would imagine a corp can even probably directly negotiate a discount with their insurance provider by instating such measures.
You go into the bathroom, you SCHLOOP out your business in ~15 seconds, and you’re done, like a deer in the woods! Wiping is practically a formality! It’s like getting years of your life back.
fiber supplements may well help that and more but if you want to get all the benefits, eat actual real food. Well informed researchers will tell you there's a lot of research that shows those supplements aren't nearly as helpful as actual fruits and vegetables.
Tech is bigger than just coders. Electrical engineers have not had the cornucopia of job-hopping opportunities that web developers have enjoyed over the past couple of decades.
Almost certainly at their scale they are the risk bearer of their primary employee health insurance offering and pay flat fees for administration of the plan. No negotiations necessary, just internal modeling.
I don't want to eat a bag of processed garbage full of sugar, hydrogenated oils, artificial colorings and preservatives. But a banana or an apple, sure, good mid-afternoon snack. I'm probably a fairly normal eater for the demographic.
The argument I heard was that people like to have it available and it does not cost a lot. Kinds the same thing as having a free coffee, milk or whatever.
> the argument being that having employees eat these instead of bagged chips/candy would reduce your health care spend in the long run.
Source? It seems far fetched to assume employers making long term decisions in a world where people get laid off on a whim. What's the average seniority, couple of years? To me it seems more likely that it's what employees want.
At web companies maybe, but not tech in general (however we define that nowadays). At least that's been my experience. My mentors have each been 10+ years seniority at their respective companies.
I cannot imagine paying an employee six figures usd and not giving them every possible free consumable while they are physically present in the office.
Intel has about 25 million employee workdays a year. Someone did the math that spending even an extra dollar or two per workday is a lot of money. It is a lot of money, but close to a rounding error compared to total payroll spending.
Loads of places switched to coffee pods for the free coffee. Those things often run like $0.40-$0.50/ea for name brand varieties, not including the cost of water filters and what not. Probably cheaper per unit if you just serve large carafes of it.
A 12oz soda from a soda fountain has a marginal cost of like $0.10. Even then cans of soda can be had wholesale for ~<$0.50, especially off-brand varieties.
> Intel’s chief people officer, explained that the company had been spending approximately $100 million annually on free and discounted food and beverages
I haven't done any napkin math or anything but that seems like a colossal figure.
Ok, napkin math... Intel was at 125k employees, trending down. So $800/employee. If every employee was 5 days a week and used the free-coffee/food-discount every day (obviously not true) that'd be 365*5/7 = 260 days. $800 / 260 = $3/day.
That's at least somewhat believable, in the ballpark of plausibility.
And that's 5 billions just for salaries if the average salary is 40k (which maybe is not so far off), and then 100 million is "just 2%" of the salaries.
A problem for large organizations is that all the numbers look big in isolation. $100M seems like a lot of money, but 2% of $5Bn doesn't quite have the same sound, and the 5% efficiency drop because your workers are now having to go figure out where their coffee is coming from and/or updating their linkedin because you've just signaled you don't particularly value their time doesn't seem to register either.
Im one of the people that thinks they are functionally the same with a tax benefit (not a dodge)
Manipulation of the market rings hollow. The price changes, but there is no deceit. Running a successful business or starting a dividend also changes the price, but isn't manipulation. Who exactly is duped by BuyBacks?
The only segnificant difference is that with stock buybacks, they have a bit more control over how and when it happens.
Investors have turned dividends into a religion. They must come every quarter like clockwork and never decrease; otherwise, it seems like there's a five-alarm fire and the place is on the brink of bankruptcy. It is irrational but reality.
I wouldn't even say they defer them, because the taxable event has not occurred. It allows people too let leave their money at risk longer, including the gains.
If BuyBacks make stock price go up, stockholders haven't made any money yet. They can be wiped out at any time and lose everything.
BuyBacks simply give the shareholders the choice of if and when to cash out any gains and losses they may have.
"Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money." - Tim O'Reilly
I think that's really good advice for governing one's personal life or running a lifestyle business. I don't think it is a accurate reflection of the desires of shareholder owners - they aren't there to enjoy the ride.
That's the difference between being a shareholder and running a business. For those who are actually driving things, they need to focus on more than just money to really be successful. For shareholders who have some distance from business operations, they can make do with "number go up".
This is hard to understate the importance of this. If a company feels obligated to cut spending by cutting small expenses on consumables, such as coffee or even free fruit programs, then they are at a level of going through the proverbial couch cushions hoping to find a coin to meet the budget.
My impression is that these employee creature comforts are the absolute first thing to go. It's when the scope of business is narrowed or segments/IP is sold off that I would start worrying. I have no special insight on this, however.
> My impression is that these employee creature comforts are the absolute first thing to go.
Is that even such a bad thing? Given the choice between cutting expenses on food/drinks and firing people, I cant really blame a manager for choosing to keep the people and lose the coffee.
> Is that even such a bad thing? Given the choice between cutting expenses on food/drinks and firing people, (...)
The whole point is that if you're already faced with the choice if cutting coffee or firing people, you will already fire people regardless of how much you cut in coffee. It's futile and specious reasoning, which at most only work as signaling.
Great idea, let’s also lower salaries so they can’t afford the toilets so they use them less, means more work and less expenses. Also we will make money on the toilets
Is this real life? This reads like an article on The Onion