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posted by martyb on Friday November 13 2015, @04:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-price-of-free dept.

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?
...
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."


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  • (Score: 2) by hankwang on Friday November 13 2015, @02:39PM

    by hankwang (100) on Friday November 13 2015, @02:39PM (#262657) Homepage

    "Clearly profitable" is not so black and white. Someone still needs to be paid to go around and refill those machines, repair them, pick up or deliver pallets with snacks, and so on. The floor space (at €€/m^2) taken by the machine cannot be used for other things and you have the depreciation of the machine.

    If it's too cheap, you'll need to refill them twice a day and you contribute to obesity and diabetes (At least I would need a lot of self-control if we had free soft drinks here). Healthy snacks are usually perishable, although one could consider things like apples.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday November 13 2015, @05:33PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday November 13 2015, @05:33PM (#262762)

    Healthy is expensive: A huge company I regularly visit has 25-cent cans of soft drinks, but $1.25 water bottle.

    Oddly, they also provide free fruits (bananas and apples), and a water fountain next to the vending machines. It's still profitable for the external vending company, though.