> Okay, pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks and the money you were going to pay the person who you pay to fetch the snacks, and I'll go fetch my own snacks or order them off the internet to my desk.
Your office manager (or whoever) orders snacks from a contractor in bulk once a month (they don't make N GrubHub/etc individual orders every day). If they give you your fraction of that back, it wouldn't cover your GrubHub/etc order. Perks work because of these economies of scale.
You can rail against the value of these perks, but "give me the cash and let me decide for myself" doesn't work.
Also, even if they were to give you your fraction of that back, that would count as taxable income - unless they categorize it as a "stipend" -- which requires a lot more up-front accounting/legal work on their end.
You may prefer getting $6/wk (or $5.04/wk after taxes) more instead of snacks at work, but the simple fact is that your employer provides snacks because it's in their best interest to do so. Whether it's in your interest is not the decisive factor, though they may take your opinion into consideration.
I feel like this conversation got massively side-tracked. Are you arguing in good faith that the amount of value some snacks provide to an employee is meaningful when compared to the other things the GP mentioned?
This entire thread is the reason unions are such a pain in the a$$.
You have a bunch of employees who have never run a company confidently telling with their handwaving math how things should work. You have a dozen people patting themselves and others on the back for the idea of getting a sliver of their snack budget back in salary with no concept of economies of scale.
While unionizing for backbreaking work like the manufacturing industry makes sense, in tech it is a nightmare. Let's see where Kickstarter finds itself in the next recession and see how things work out when executives can no longer make quick decisions but are forced to do everything by committee.
I'm not referring to large, faceless corporations, I'm referring to >100 person orgs. My experience can't be an outlier as there are plenty of vendors that specialize in this space, so someone out there is buying from a vendor. Here's what I found on the first page of search results:
Well I'm certainly not ordering from GrubHub either.
> Your office manager (or whoever) orders snacks from a contractor in bulk once a month (they don't make N GrubHub/etc individual orders every day). If they give you your fraction of that back, it wouldn't cover your GrubHub/etc order. Perks work because of these economies of scale.
What's the economy of scale on me getting up and going to get a fresh salad even when snacks are provided for free, because I value my health and sanity?
If you don’t value it, that’s fine. No one is holding a gun to your head and demanding you eat the snacks, but your original proposition was about using that money to buy your own snacks which doesn’t work for the aforementioned economies of scale.
Really, you think buying my own snacks doesn't work? I gotta tell you, I've been accused of many things, but being unable to buy snacks is not one of them.
Sure, maybe it costs me some minuscule amount of money: if that's your point you can have it. Congrats! You win that argument.
My argument is: pretending that snacks are a meaningful benefit in negotiating employment is a huge loss to employees. But if you want to choose your job based on the snack benefit, have fun working for reduced wages so you can sit at your desk more.
> If you don’t value it, that’s fine. No one is holding a gun to your head and demanding you eat the snacks, but your original proposition was about using that money to buy your own snacks which doesn’t work for the aforementioned economies of scale.
And before that, you said:
> You can rail against the value of these perks, but "give me the cash and let me decide for myself" doesn't work.
Buying my own snacks works just fine, because in an economy of scale, snacks simply are irrelevant. The greatest relevance they have is as a contract negotiation chip where employers try to sell them as a benefit which gets weighed against things that actually matter, like salary.
If you view snacks as an inherently important thing, I guess I can't argue with you on that, but I think most people wouldn't agree with you if they realized how much money they might be leaving behind by considering things like snacks when choosing a job.
Your office manager (or whoever) orders snacks from a contractor in bulk once a month (they don't make N GrubHub/etc individual orders every day). If they give you your fraction of that back, it wouldn't cover your GrubHub/etc order. Perks work because of these economies of scale.
You can rail against the value of these perks, but "give me the cash and let me decide for myself" doesn't work.