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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @02:17PM
It just doesn't make sense to me. Compared to employee costs, it's practically nothing. It improves morale, and I guess might mitigate the problem described in the summary.
Then again, there's a reason I'm not CEO.
Off the top of my head, there is a cynical and non-cynical explanation.
Non-cynical: It's more complicated than you think. I'm sure everybody here would agree that things are always harder than they appear they "should" be on the outside... Did you account for the time people will be spent buying the food and laying it out? Who will be cleaning up? What if there is a mess, and/or insects get attracted to the area? What if somebody gets food poisoning? What if somebody has Coeliac disease, are you now discriminating against them?
Cynical: The CEO disregarded your ideas because "it not how people do things."
As a side note, if you think it's such a great idea, why don't you just do it yourself? As you note, it doesn't appear to be that expensive.