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To boost its bottom line, Sprint decided last week to end the era of free office snacks for its employees. The move represents a tiny fraction of the struggling telecom's effort to cut $2.5 billion from its total operating expenses. Axing the free food will shave $600,000 from the budget. But at what cost?
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From the most cynical point of view, however, this isn't just a case of corporate largesse. Snacks keep workers in the office working instead of out foraging for sustenance during working hours. A 2011 study by Staples found that half of all workers left the office to get snacks at least once a day, with some people making as many as five trips to get their munchie fix. Snack runs account for 2.4 billion hours in lost productivity in the U.S., according to the study. It should be noted, of course, that Staples and your boss have a shared interest in keeping more people in the office.
There has been no economic study on the elasticity of perks. Proposing Phoenix's Law: "When free coffee, soda, and snacks go, so should you."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by q.kontinuum on Friday November 13 2015, @05:59AM
One company I worked for in the past had a refrigerator, but no free snacks. One day I started buying big packs of ice-cream cones, put a per-piece price on the box and a small container next to it. I sold basically at cost (rounding up to next 10 cent). My effort was as neglectable as my financial gain. Other benefits (personal reputation, satisfaction of seeing everyone paying honestly, no-one touching the unprotected money, perceived gain in team moral) were price-less.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 5, Interesting) by riT-k0MA on Friday November 13 2015, @08:41AM
Slightly off-topic, but I thought I'd share it anyway.
I work for a company that develops a mobile payment platform. We have a vending machine in the office. One day the vending machine was accidentally left unlocked by the owner (This machine is not the company).
After being contacted the owner rushed back as he was extremely concerned that the vending machine would be looted by unscrupulous individuals. When he reached the vending machine his worst fears were concerned: a mob of people was crowded around the open machine, sticking their hands into the interior. On closer inspection he realised that not a single item in the machine had been stolen. Instead the geek-types were trying to understand how the machine worked and were discussing whether or not is would be easy to integrate the company's mobile payment solution into the machine.