A place that I worked (not in the bay area) had a cafeteria where employees could eat one meal for free per workday by using a meal ticket. They also cut deals with nearby restaurants so the meal tickets could be used as basically $5 vouchers at the restaurants. That seemed like an OK compromise. Not sure how it worked behind the scenes.
My employer gives me free health care. Should that be restricted so I have to spend my own dollars and not get the benefit of a group plan?
Should employers not be allowed to give a transit subsidy because it hurts Lyft/Uber?
Maybe tech companies should not be allowed to offer stock based compensation because it's unfair to other city residents who work jobs without such things.
Honestly as an employee it felt like a win all around. If I was tired of the office or my co workers I could go somewhere else. Tried a lot of restaurants I wouldn't have otherwise, so great for them. And the company didn't have to scale their cafeteria as fast as they might have otherwise when hiring.
Your health care is not “free” it’s part of your compensation where the employer gets to choose how you’re compensated. I get healthcare via my wife’s insurance and I would much rather have the money.
In a sane society, your health care wouldn’t be tied to your employer.
Contesting this on the grounds that until a line-item on my paystub starts showing up for the cost of a free lunch, I don't think they're comparable at all.
The line-item on your pay stub was a mandate from Obamacare for price transparency. Prior to that the employer contribution for healthcare did not appear.
Man - California, specifically the Valley, is completely off its rocker when it comes to policy making.
I really hope Amazon's new HQ helps pave the way to start de-centralizing the tech industry from that one, overcrowded, and increasingly almost hostile spot.
I'd just like to point out that Amazon HQ isn't in California, it's in Washington over near Microsoft, separated by half of California and the state of Oregon. Either way, I hope the same
Right, but it sounded as if they were implying the old HQ was in Silicon Valley. I'm sure that wasn't the intention, just clarifying for the possibility of readers who may misinterpret.
If you're in Northern California it usually refers to Central California Valley which is San Joaquin Valley and Sacramento Valley. If you're in Southern California it usually refers to San Fernando Valley.
Talk about fascist capitalism. If I ran these companies I'd make everything cost one cent and have a giant barrel of pennies just sitting around with "take what you need" written in it. It's not free anymore. Problem solved.
No, if your employer is giving you $10k worth of meals (their cost to produce them) and charging you $100 for it, you are taxable on the $9,900 benefit.
Do employees today get taxed on the value of the free food ? Why would that be different if it costs 1$ , and how do you define the value of the free food anyways ?
Do you get taxed on the free coke you get in the break room ? It just doesn't seem to work like that. It would also require to put a $ amount on the price of the "free" meal.
Which would not make it free anymore.
So if I buy a product for $100, that cost a company $200 to produce, I am liable for a $100 taxable benefit? Now I'm _definitely_ staying away from all those Black Friday and BOGO sales.
The grandparents comment is specifically true of employment fringe benefits, and not true of sales to the general public, though meals may be excluded if they meet the rest of being provided for the emplkyer’s convenience.
Yes, the penny-per-meal charge would be a tiny amount of income which, presuming deductible business expenses did not increase to absorb it, would be subject to corporate income tax (which is really a retained profits tax.)
None of the companies involved are even going to notice it.
No, it’s the value of the free meals that’s considered taxable income. IIRC there was already a controversy about this a couple years ago. Employees getting the equivalent of what, $20 in free food every day? That adds up to real money.
The decision to charge a penny by the company doesn't change that in any meaningful way, AFAICT, so it may be a tax issue for employees, but it doesn't seem relevant to the proposal that was being discussed.
No, of course not. Citizens United says you can’t limit a corporations ability to create and distribute a political movie by pretending to regulate money not speech.
It has no bearing on what sorts of non-speech activities you can regulate, even though they happen to involve money.
CU (and before it Buckley v. Valeo) stands (in relevant part) for the idea that the right to spend money on Constitutionally protected expression is itself part of the scope of the right protected. It's not “money is speech” but “the freedom to spend money on speech is part of the freedom of speech”; the former makes a better soundbite and can be a useful memory aid, but loses critical information if taken as the core message.
You can definitely tell a corporation how to spend their money, just not as a way to limit protected speech. That's pretty much all zoning laws are after all restrictions on how people and corporations can spend their money.
Freedom of religion, speech, press, petition, and assembly. Nope food's not in there, but perhaps I'm being too originalist. Eminent Domain is a thing too.
The right to self-rule outside the enumerated powers of the federal government (and thus, the general police power of the states) is a right of the people against the federal government.
At the risk of being a Debbie Downer, I don't think it matters much whether or not your view has merits. The federal armed forces reduce this to an argumentum ad baculum.
In practice, not usually. It's usually resolved in the courts, often partially or wholly in favor of state power, without resort to argumentum ad baculum.
While I think it is totally bonkers, I think it is probably within the city's authority to forbid institutional food prep and/or a kitchen within spaces zoned for commercial use but not generally accessible to the public.
I don't think they have really thought this through though. For example, would this forbid a soupe kitchen that serves hot meals, how about a nursing home or a hospital?
There is only one city with the legislation in place, which is Mountain View. It only applies to Facebook's new offices near the San Antonia shopping center.
It's likely legal for states to do it
It would not be legal for the feds.
There are fun loopholes though.
Here's the text of the condition for facebook.
"CAFETERIA CONDITION: In order to foster synergy between office, restaurant, and retail uses in the Center and realize the economic vitality of the project, the project anticipates employees in the office space will utilize food and retail services available in the Center. The applicant will encourage tenants and employees of tenants to utilize food and retail services available in the Center. Neither the applicant nor tenant(s) will subsidize meals by more than fifty percent (50%) or provide free meals for employees in the office space on a regular daily basis. An employer can subsidize or pay for employee meals as long as they are patronizing restaurants in the Center.
In addition: The applicant may make a request to amend this condition. The City Manager or a designee may make a recommendation to the City Council on this matter."
So for example:
Facebook could open a restaurant in the center. If it does, it cannot legally choose to discriminate in who they serve (in california, anyway. In a lot of states you often can).
It can, however, legally price discriminate in various ways (AFAIK, if someone has case law otherwise, love to see it). This is in fact, quite common.
So for example, it could charge the public that walks in 1 million a meal.
It could offer advance tickets to employees at no charge, and no one else.
This is also non-discriminatory on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin (which is what the 1964 civil rights act covers), disabilities (covering the ADA), etc.
I don't believe it would be found discriminatory to a protected class in most states (a lot of states add political affiliation, etc).
(this is just an example, and one i'm sure the IRS would have fun with :P)
There's a law in certain states that you can't serve alcohol in an establishment that doesn't also serve food. So, many breweries have tasting rooms where at the bottom of the menu, it makes it clear that, by law, they are required to have a food section - with a single token item which they will serve you, like a Pizza Pop or a single M&M - with jocular disdain.
How would that work for a huge complex like the Googleplex?
They'd have to provide public access to all parts of their complex to comply.
> So for example, it could charge the public that walks in 1 million a meal.
Not a lawyer, but I think that will break the law. Otherwise, "public access" will become completely meaningless: if I don't like you, all items on the menu are no $1m, and of course you cannot stay on premise without ordering...
I'd love to hear a real lawyer analyzing this, but imho, both your suggestions constitute attempts to completely circumvent a law based on technicalities, which is a dangerous game to play when you're a corporation with offices in the jurisdiction of the legislative body you're trying to circumvent.
Your simple solution will also not work for very large businesses (due to the need to open up their entire campus for public access), nor small ones (who can't afford the cost in funds and labor of creating a separate public-access restaurant).
In my estimation, this will make any company think twice about starting a big office in MTV.
Yeah, the proposed legislation mentioned in the article in San Francisco just banning the construction of onsite cafeterias seems to recognize this at least.
That's how I am reading it. And if their aim is to drum up foot traffic on streets to stimulate local business, I don't think that violates the spirit of the legislation.
This proposal would ban the construction of office cafeterias so if you're just serving free catered food (which is what most small and medium companies do, I'd guess) it's fine.
MTV isn't "hostile" to tech. It just got greedy and is trying to get more out of its resident tech companies.
"So we have all these big tech companies opening offices in our town... How do we get more out of them... Let's force their employees to buy their food in local stores by banning free food... Let's tax them a bit more..."
Etc.
This will work in the short term, especially when some of these rules only apply to new offices.
It will fail on the long term, as more and more companies question the wisdom of setting up shops in the Valley and California in general, and move to locations with much lower tax and restrictions, such as Austin TX.
>It will fail on the long term, as more and more companies question the wisdom of setting up shops in the Valley and California in general, and move to locations with much lower tax and restrictions, such as Austin TX.
But that will only last a decade or two before they turn Austin (or wherever) into SF 2.0 and all the business goes elsewhere.
By the time Austin is SF2.0 local government in Austin will be made up of all the same clowns that make up local government in SF. CA was like Texas once upon a time.
Texas government don't pass intrusive policies ? They literally passed a law that forces women to bury aborted fetus. I mean that is 100x more intrusive than cafeterias
> It will fail on the long term, as more and more companies question the wisdom of setting up shops in the Valley and California in general, and move to locations with much lower tax and restrictions, such as Austin TX.
That sounds like a success from the perspective of folks who don't want their suburb to turn into SF or Manhattan?
If they don't want their suburb to turn into SF or Manhattan, then they're definitely taking the wrong turn by introducing this legislation.
Instead of a suburban office location, they are actively encouraging urbanization: more restaurants, more commercial spaces in general, more residents.
Moreover, all these tech campuses represent the majority of the richest residents of suburbs like MTV, and the main reason they are rich and have good schools etc. It would be very odd if the community as a whole wanted all that gone, especially when techies are a large part of the community.
Finally, if MTV wanted to repel tech, there are much more effective ways to do that with legislation. For example, they could apply the legislation to existing offices.
So no, I don't believe this is part of some campaign to avert MTV turning into "Manhattan", which is not something that can happen in the foreseeable future anyway.
as someone who works in a place a solid few miles from restaurants, and has a break room with a few microwaves/a toaster oven as well as a vending machine with gas station tier food... how common are workplace cafeterias like this? is it just sv megacompanies or is it smaller firms across the country?
Every remotely-tech-related company with more than 10 employees in San Francisco will provide free food. Only the large ones (more than 500 employees?) will have an on-site kitchen in the cafeteria with dedicated chefs and cooks.
I work for a medium sized company in the commercial insurance space in PA. We have a cafeteria. They do charge for meals, but we have access to unlimited drinks. I think larger companies in general will have a cafeteria of some kind, but free food is very much a perk of software companies on the whole, I do believe.
i don't even mind charging for meals, but not having to spend most of my lunch break driving for easy food would be a huge plus. guess i know what to look for once i graduate.
I've worked in a lot of places with cafeterias in the Bay Area and we still went out to eat a few times a week for variety, a change of pace and to satisfy a desire for some food that was not available or much higher quality than the cafeterias, and since we commuted together from/to restaurants, it was more time spent socializing with coworkers and getting out of the office and getting some sun and fresh air. In my opinion so it might not matter to everyone, it's kind of a waste to live here with this fantastic weather 9-10 months a year and not spend some of that time outdoors, even during the work day.
It's pretty much unheard of. Large companies will frequently have cafeterias and they may be partially subsidized but it's very rare that they would be 0 cost to employees.
Also, the quality of ingredients and the creativity and care in preparation and presentation is significantly better than I've seen elsewhere, although the executive dining room at global HQ for one of the companies I worked for did rival Facebook or Google's typical cafe experience.
This is very interesting, I had never considered the impact free food at a large office has on its surroundings. The legislation certainly sounds backwards, but to me the situation is reminiscent of a company using profits from one sector to subsidize another, in order to drown out competitors in that space. I don't think Facebook is actually trying to kill off restaurants, but this is definitely how you would do it in an anti-competitive way.
Does anyone know if the government tried to get any of the companies to try to partner with local food places? Like grahamburger mentioned in their post?
It's going to make a huge difference in terms of FB's appeal to potential employees. Who wants to work at FB if it means that you'll have to waste time and energy figuring out what to do for lunch every day?
Getting away from work doesn't have to mean getting away from your coworkers and your workplace. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty good about leaving my work at my desk -- when I get up to wander around, or to take a break, I don't have to leave my workplace to be 'away from work'.
And is trading your coworkers for pushy crowds of strangers and traffic nightmares really that good of a deal? Because in MTV, that's what you're trading for. Getting away from work at lunch means dealing with even bigger and even more annoying crowds.
If two companies offer offer same salary and similar in every other sense, but one doesn't offer free food, I will choose one that does. If the company that doesn't offer food has +$20 salary per day, I would probably still choose one with food. It's easier, more convenient and probably healthier as well.
"If two companies offer offer same salary and similar in every other sense, but one doesn't offer free food, I will choose one that does."
... but in reality there are hardly any jobs that are so directly equal.
I used to always 'go for the money' when I was younger, but now ... all the other factors matter so much. Just the temperament of your direct reports matter so much. One fewer headache a week? What's that worth? A lot :)
Meals are a nice thing, but relatively small in the equation, at least compared to all the things related to the job ... and I find the food more a matter of convenience than anything. Personally, I'd be happy with free microwave burritos on those 'I'm busy' days, but that's just me.
I would argue that figuring out where to go for lunch, getting there, waiting in line with the dozens if not more other people who had a similar hankering, getting my food, eating in a crowded area or taking it back to work, are way more than one headache a week. I would consider that a daily migraine. In fact, that was my daily migraine before I just stopped going out for lunch altogether.
Free food isnt just about the food. Its also the convenience. I already have to fight traffic getting to work, and I fight through the crowds any time I go shopping or anywhere remotely popular in the area. Having to deal with that madness in the middle of a work day when I just want a meal would certainly be a dealbreaker for me.
And from my understanding, you wouldn't get any free microwave burritos -- those would be illegal.
If you take a giant shit on the sidewalk outside of the restaurant, SF will roll out a red carpet for you, but God forbid you try to give an employee a free lunch or a plastic straw.
This is one of the most stupid policy I have ever seen in the bay area (and there are a lot of stupid ones over here).
As much as I dislike some of the big tech cos and the TechBros working there bragging about the free food all the time, I still believe a company should be able to decide if they want to offer food or not.
Restaurants were unable to turn a profit, so they lobbied successfully and now everyone beside them got a worse outcome.
This is economy 101. A highly visible group of people lobbied hard (in this case the restaurants), and they put a small burden on everyone else to have their issue resolved.
However when you calculate the outcome, the burden on everyone else is bigger than the gain that the highly visible group got out of it. Everyone is worse off.
Or rather, 'economy 101' is that anyone with enough leverage, will use monopoly powers in one area, to take control of an adjacent economy.
American Oil empires were not built on some new amazing way to get at oil, it was because some had control of the railroads, and charged their competitors a little more to transport therefore putting them out of business (through aggressive consolidation).
The FB cafeteria example is not a very good one admittedly, but an alternative could be 'they buy up all the restaurants in the area and make them exclusively available for FB staff'. Which they very well could do, and it would then seem kind of crazy, no?
Economically speaking, it would be 'above bar'. After all, 'free market', right? If neighbourhood residents want to eat in a restaurant, screw them, they can go across town!
We live in communities, not economies.
The city ordinance is stupid, but the motivation is not.
Ironically, these are 'rich people problems' ... the kinds of things that happen when little dots of wealth blow up and there is a huge economic inequality, even if most people are 'kind of well off'.
> an alternative could be 'they buy up all the restaurants in the area and make them exclusively available for FB staff'.
If Facebook is willing to pay substantial amounts of money for a restaurant, while at the same time guaranteeing customers to those who refuse to sell, it would seem the number of public restaurants in the area will explode.
In Monaco, there are a small number of 'Monegasque' i.e. actual ethnic people from Monaco - they are just 'regular folk' - not like the bankers and millionaires ex-pats that make up the most of the actual citizenry.
The 'wealth inequality' issue is obviously a problem, so the government mandates that 'all citizens get meal chits' as part of their comp - this is to ensure that Monegasque folks literally are not priced out of food.
But everyone gets them - bankers included (the uber-rich don't work ...). So you go into a restaurant there and these dudes in $5K suits are pulling out their 'meal cards' to pay for stuff, it's kind of funny.
But it has to be that way.
If facebook et. al. has set up their own 'shuttle bus' system, there's no reason to believe they won't set up 'private restaurants' around town to get around the city's regulations, which will sure to cause even more angst and obvious concern.
Better to just let them have their cafeterias ... but the weird kind of inequality thing is not going to go away.
No, because the meal chits are paid by employers. No job, no chits. Moreover, it's a tiny, incidental cost. More resembling the American healthcare system (in terms of how it's paid, not in terms of cost). Also, the scale is so small ... there are 20K citizens there and only a couple thousand actual Monegasque, they literally are 1 or 2 degrees of separation from one another and 'the government' if you can even call it that. Literally Google serves more free lunches every day in their cafeterias than are served in the entirety of Monaco's restaurants and kitchens.
Not if most of the people in the area, or even a decent chunk of them, work at Facebook.
If there are ten restaurants and one of them is pretty much the default choice for 25% of the people, that leaves the rest of the restaurants with an effective 75% of the market, which shrinks their customer base quite a lot.
The other customers are still there. Facebook's office is replacing old retail space, which is not much used on weekdays either. This will only increase traffic to those restaurants even without forcing Facebook to send all its employees their way.
As it turns out, poverty doesn't cause crime. It's relative poverty that causes crime. Basically, if people are low down enough on the dominance hierarchy, they feel like they have no hope of getting anywhere, then why shouldn't they start acting up?
Obviously, we don't want everyone to stay poor. At the same time, we don't want certain people to be so low on the dominance hierarchy, that they think violence is their only alternative.
i don’t believe it has to do with position on a dominance hierarchy.
i think it has more to do with dignity.
Those two are the same thing. Dignity == not being at the absolute bottom end of a dominance hierarchy.
Since human society is very complex, there are many somewhat orthogonal dominance hierarchies. That revered old statesman in your esoteric music fandom might be a school janitor somewhere. Those local-star music scene musicians might get ushered into a billionaire's party through the back door of the kitchen, then be strictly warned not to touch any of the food.
being treated with dignity hasn’t nothing to do with one’s social status.
to be treated with dignity would be for the billionaire’s staff to escort the low status individuals with grace and provide food for them in a way that affords them respect while satisfying whatever other constraint which precludes the billionaire from involving these persons in the main event.
to risk ruining my point by being petty: sounds like a billionaire with no class.
Crime can absolutely produce a bad feedback loop to a community, but I would love to see more research on what causes what. We can see that countries that become a lot richer and keeps wealth inequality under control has a connection with drops in crime, like in Australia for example. However, I don't think drops in crime caused the resource boom there and I don't think Detroit's crime rate caused the Japanese and German economies to become more advanced and outperform the American auto industry.
If you're in a society where everyone is poor, there is not peace, there's extreme violence being applied by a government that is responsible for everyone being poor (it's not just a subtle thing for everyone to be poor, that requires an incredible amount of persistent violence and rights denial by a central authority with overwhelming power). You're just swapping one type of violence out for another.
Tribes constantly warred with each other, because they saw that as a good way to get resources.
Of course, during the middle ages it was feudalism, which was not centralized at all, it was stratified. Classes, classes, classes. Haves and have not-s. The haves of course arranged things in a way to keep what they have, so they come up with rights for themselves, which were very much not egalitarian ones.
And of course there's the real centralized one-party autocratic setup, where instead of noble houses openly competing with each other, people just play the subtle game of extort those who are under you, which makes inequality even worse.
If you're in a society where everyone is poor, there is not peace, there's extreme violence being applied by a government that is responsible for everyone being poor
This is a relatively recent phenomenon. To have oppression, there has to be enough of a surplus for a ruling class to extract. For many 10's of thousands of years, our ancestors didn't have the means to have a surplus.
Also, we have many examples of local societies which are egalitarian, but embedded within a larger, distant feudal hierarchy. In some of those cases, there can be very little violence directed locally, though in other cases, people can be so low in society, again, their only hope for advancement is violence.
Where there have been increases in the general standard of living, it has been through the adoption of new technology and the increase of trade.
The City already tries to foster community by forcing people to share space against their will, via public transit. It's a dystopian hellscape, not a community. You can't just build those by force.
While I was a BART commuter, I walked a gauntlet of slumped-over hard drug users, sprawled-out homeless people, human urine, and feces every day. Fortunately, I've only seen people drop their pants and take a shit on the sidewalk in front of me twice. Missed a random stabbing on the stairwell into my station by about 5 minutes.
This is Civic Center Station, which serves Twitter, Uber, and Square. No amount of tech worker foot traffic is going to clean up an area if the government isn't willing to police it.
> No amount of tech worker foot traffic is going to clean up an area if the government isn't willing to police it.
And policing will just drive the problem somewhere else. What America desperately needs is a new approach to a lot of issues that goes way beyond ever more police, courts and jails:
- drugs and addictions (now that enough white middle class people suffer from heroin or worse, something hopefully will be done beyond the "put them all in prison" attitude that caused the War on Drugs in the first place)
- mental health resources, whose lack of is directly affecting or even causing much of the homeless population
And until we discover and universally [0] implement that "new approach," public space will be avoided at all costs by those who can help it.
[0] San Francisco welcomes the downtrodden from everywhere in the world; it's not enough to solve poverty in the US to clean up SF's streets; you must eradicate it from every inch of the Earth.
That's not an inherent problem of public transit. It's just a symptom of failing to take care of poor people in your society. Try taking public transit in a civilized country like Germany or Japan.
I didn’t say it was an inherent problem of public transit. But it is an inherent problem of compelling people to share space in San Francisco. The library, for example, is a similar story.
The array of policy, economics, and values that make Germany and Japan work so well are not going to magically appear in an American city just because you try to cargo-cult some of their second-order effects. Public space in those countries is genuinely good; you don’t have to ban alternatives to get people to use it.
A pretty big nitpick, but the world is infinitely more complex than anything in an 'Econ 101' class would be able to actually explain. 101 level classes often simplify things to the point of uselessness.
The economy 101 angle here is that this is a tax write off for most businesses, so these free meals not only disrupt local food markets but are subsidized to do so.
That's pretty similar to what Microsoft does with its myriad Cafés on campus. The food seemed cheaper than a restaurant, as if they charge for labor + ingredients. You could only order there as an employee or guest of an employee, though.
I live in one of the heroin hotspots of Australia, where they hand out free needles like candy.
It's better than the alternative, which is people sharing needles and giving each other all sorts of diseases.
Not only do they hand out free needles though, but also free sharps containers, and there are needle disposal bins all over the place for users to drop their used needles in.
I'm not sure how they convinced all the heroin users to dispose of their needles correctly, but they've done a fairly good job. It's rare for me to see a needle on the street.
You can take a dump and shoot heroine on the sidewalk but God help you if you if you hand out a plastic straw or offer somebody a cup of water in a restaurant. What a utopia we live in.
There is a lot of good food in this area (San Antonio shopping center in Mountain View), places that would draw the workers on their own merits anyway. Sajj, Chef Chu’s, Dittmers, Mamacitas food truck, Paul Martin, Pacific Fresh, several pho places, I could go on.
Exactly. A big tech office next door will only give them nore customers than they have already, even if the office has its own cafeteria. Why are they forcing everybody to leave their office to eat?
Since the article doesn't have it that i saw, here's the text of the facebook development condition in san antonio center:
""CAFETERIA CONDITION: In order to foster synergy between office, restaurant, and retail uses in the Center and realize the economic vitality of the project, the project anticipates employees in the office space will utilize food and retail services available in the Center. The applicant will encourage tenants and employees of tenants to utilize food and retail services available in the Center. Neither the applicant nor tenant(s) will subsidize meals by more than fifty percent (50%) or provide free meals for employees in the office space on a regular daily basis. An employer can subsidize or pay for employee meals as long as they are patronizing restaurants in the Center.
In addition: The applicant may make a request to amend this condition. The City Manager or a designee may make a recommendation to the City Council on this matter."
Cannot bundle a free meal with your job because it's abusing your position to stifle competition. I jest but I imagine it may be hard for some restaurants to open and offer lunch menu's in these areas.
I can kind of see where Mountain View is coming from, basically the "San Antonio Center" (if you didn't read the article, MV is only applying the restriction in that particular place, not in the whole MV) is one of two places in MV with some life and bustle (it's kinda the day destination, having a bunch of grocery shops as well as a walmart, kohls and target and the other is kind of the night destination, being more focused around restaurants and nightclubs), and if they allow some big company to have their own cafeterias and self-segregate it could risk killing the life of the place.
One thing they should do in my opinion is make the place more pedestrian friendly. Maybe they could replace the big parking lots that create sprawl with denser garages?
Why would it risk killing the life of the place? The people who already eat lunch there will still eat lunch there. This is simply a money grab by the people who happen to already be there, just like Prop 13 and rent control.
Large employers moving in and increasing land value would also increase the rent that a commercial landlord could get for offices vs. restaurants. Restaurants get no upside to this since it's very hard to compete with free. And this is before we consider that new companies moving in with free cafeterias could be replacing old companies with no free cafeterias.
California's found a unique way to incorporate only the shitty parts of European socialism without adding in any of the massive benefits. We get the same high taxes and restrictive overreaching laws without any of the free healthcare, free university tuition, or pension plans.
Company-provided lunch provides an opportunity to build relationship among the coworkers. Most people do not says "no" to free lunch, especially if it's good. So, they naturally sit down together to eat.
When I worked at a company that offered free lunch, the company used it to help build rapport and camaraderie among the coworkers. It's one time during the day when the entire team can sit down and eat lunch together and get to know about each other, which is not possible through Slack nor via meetings. Just hanging out with everyone on the team, talking about the latest Marvel movie or Star wars, etc. It was also about convenience as well as reducing stress and decisions on an already-busy day.
If the team still wants to do lunch together everyday at an outside restaurant, it would not be easy, especially the logistics, which would be a nightmare -- getting everyone to agree on one place where everyone likes their food, finding a place that can seat the entire group at a single table, finding transportation / assigning driver/riders if it's beyond walking distance, and having to divide the check afterward (or Venmo), etc. Just for a meal that lasts no more than an hour, top.
It gets easier when the routine settles in. Eventually you will find a kind of schedule that suits everyone. Then it is mostly a matter of a few quick questions and maybe a call ahead with preorders. I have it seen working well with very different teams.
When I worked at a company that offered free lunch, the company used it to help build rapport and camaraderie among the coworkers. It's one time during the day when the entire team can sit down and eat lunch together and get to know about each other, which is not possible through Slack nor via meetings.
I stopped bringing my lunch to work and go out to eat specifically to get a break from my coworkers. Not that there is anything wrong with my coworkers, but I really enjoy the alone time in the middle of the day where I can just sit back and read.
The original comment regarding “bonding” was equally anecdotal - you just agree with it, and therefore perceive it to be an argument.
Rationally, there’s no inherent reason that free lunches promote “bonding”, and no inherent reason that teams that go out to lunch won’t bond. It’s just cargo culting and post hoc rationalization for people liking free food.
I absolutely brushed shoulders with more coworkers when I worked at a company that had a cafeteria (this wasn't even free to us). My current teammates eat together sometimes, but unless it's an 'event' it's just 2-3 people, and always someone who wont go due to diet or financial reasons.
I dont care about this policy one way or the other, but following is not true: "If the team still wants to do lunch together everyday at an outside restaurant, it would not be easy, especially the logistics, which would be a nightmare"
It is not nightmare, it is pretty easy thing to do and friends groups in work do it almost daily without any problem.
I think they meant taking out the entire company, say 30+ people, rather than just having lunch among your friend group, which is probably very overlapping with your team, and therefore encourages "silos", which the company already has enough of.
Going out for lunch with colleagues is quite common in some countries, e.g. Czech republic. You split into groups of five to ten people and go with the group that decided to go to the place where you like the food for the day... Usually there are several groups at different times, at 11, 12, etc.
It worked fine most of the time and you don't eat with the same ppl every day, so you get to know colleagues from neighboring teams as well...
I don't see any positive outcome to policy that tries to restrict benefits companies can offer? In a nation where many companies don't offer the greatest benefits anyway, it seems rather atrocious.
I get that this is localized in an area that has companies that probably offer better benefits than most others, but the idea of restricting benefits at all seems ludicrous to me
This is especially funny if one remembers the genesis of fringe benefits in the US. Those proliferated after, in the years of WWII, the government moved to cap salaries paid by companies. The companies, looking to attract best workers, started to offer a variety of fringe benefits - health insurance, lodging, life insurance, free food, free clothes ("uniform"), etc.
The regulation treadmill never stops, there's always a need to introduce new regulation to fix things broken by the previous regulation.
I was not surprised when I read the headline, but I was surprised when I saw the reason when I read the article.
I had expected it would be over taxes.
From the photos and description in the article and elsewhere, it looks like you can get full meals for free, meals that would cost at least $10 if bought at retail.
An employee who took two meals a day at the free company cafeteria every working day would be getting a benefit worth almost $5000/year. That's equivalent to something like an extra $8000/year salary.
I believe that food provided to employees is normally not taxable for the employee, and is actually deductible as a business expense by the employer (but I've not looked into how the recent major tax changes may have affected that), but I think that was intended for things like where employees have to remain available for emergencies during meal periods, or where meal breaks are too short to allow employees time to go get food, and things like that.
The term of art is that the meals have to be provided for the employer's convenience. In the short meal break case, for example, providing meals is for the employer's convenience because it saves them from having to offer longer meal breaks.
Meals offered for things like goodwill, morale, or attracting employees are not considered to be for the employer's convenience, but are still OK if they are de minimis. So things like donuts, soft drinks, meals when employees have to take occasional overtime, the occasional company party or picnic, and things like that are fine.
Putting in a cafeteria that offers free full meals to all employees all the time probably is not de minimis. It may not actually violate tax laws, but if it does not it is pushing the limits hard so I'd certainly not be surprised to see attempts to crack down from that angle.
The IRS values stuff like this at fair market value, not wholesale cost. The benefit to the employee is a meal that they would otherwise have to buy at retail. So that's how it's valued. If they were to enforce it.
The benefit to the employee is that he does not have to bring it from home. Why would an employee automatically go out and buy lunch when a much more practical and cheaper alternative is available?
Because preparing lunch at home and bringing it to work is kind of a nuisance? I eat lunch out almost every day and I don't make anything close to Silicon Valley income. Because I don't want to bother with preparing a lunch at home and taking it to work. And I like to get out of the office for an hour. Doesn't really matter why the employee code to accept it, the point is the employee is accepting something of value, and that value is determined based on prevailing market prices for similar things.
No, value is $10. Cost of ingredients $2. But 'making a nice dish and serving it is labour intensive' and so that brings it up to $9, the remaining $1 would be the profit of the restaurant.
A better way to think of it would be how much it would cost otherwise, and it's $10. So the calculation of annual value is pretty much there.
$10 for a full meal (not including tax and tip) is probably unrealistically low for the bay area. State and city minimum wages are increasing (SF is $14/hr and they have other mandates like healthcare coverage) so food and restaurant prices are going up (many meals seem to be in the $12-15 range, approaching $20 w/ tips). Many restaurants are closing, and are exploring alternate business practices, like pop-up stores, mandatory/included tips, and food trucks instead of fixed locations.
Forcing workers out of the office without their consent seems disingenuous. Travel expenses can be a burden, and such travel can cause disruption in areas where rideshare services may be flaky and increasingly dangerous to passengers.
The increase of food trucks is, on average, perhaps providing office workers with less nutritious food options which they have less control over (especially compared to big tech office cafes).
Increasing use of outside food establishments increases the 'lunch commute', adding to already-insane traffic, pollution, and stress for workers who already commute too much.
On the plus side, this may create increased demand for lunch spots, however it is increasingly difficult for them to operate while providing affordable prices for healthy food, and I don't think the increased demand would truly offset this effect, but rather could have negative effects on the workers caught in the middle.
Not sure where you're getting those numbers in your first paragraph (other than the minimum wage increases).
I live and work in the downtown part of San Jose, and on some days of the week work in downtown SF (SoMa near Caltrain).
I rarely spend $12-15 (more so in SJ but also in SF). Usually the significant cost is adding a soft drink of some sort (soda, juice, tea, etc.) because I'm finding restaurants are increasing the price of those for whatever reason ($2.50 at some).
Definitely wouldn't say $10 for a full meal is "unrealistically low". Perhaps it's really a matter of choice. Some people prefer to get lunch often from New American restaurants and similar where you need to tip, etc. Some don't mind going to simpler places like a taco truck around the corner, or Panera Bread/Chipotle/etc. (although I will easily admit Panera's cost has increasingly gotten more expensive, as you describe).
> because I'm finding restaurants are increasing the price of those for whatever reason ($2.50 at some).
Soft drinks are easy money. Receive, unpack, refrigerate,sell.
A soft drink that costs $0.10 to buy in a store and sells for $2.5. That's a 2500% profit margin.
If the delivery system is not a bottled/canned productbut comes in a keg, and can deliver 50 litres instead of 330ml then the margin is higher.
Of course the expenses of electricity, storage, labor, remain, but it makes a sweeter deal for the restoranteur to employ their staff for 10% of the time with 2500% margin.
I remember watching Gordon Ramsay in many of his episodes stating that restos are/should be operating with a 25% margin.
And is already stretching that tiny town thin wrt housing. I gtfo. Felt like the San Francisco of Texas, and not in a way I felt like fighting/putting up with.
Its impressive how a whole corner of the city has been rebuilt for Apple. Not saying I'd wanna live down there, that area has basically no bus service, and is straddled on all sides by freeways and highways (making walking/biking risky), but $1k will get you a decent 1 bed/1 bath apartment blocks from the office.
That being said, Apple pays people peanuts down there, $32k/yr as a contractor ain't much.
That being said, Apple pays people peanuts down there, $32k/yr as a contractor ain't much.
This is a problem across the entire tech industry. When it comes to staff and employees who don't have three letters following their name, one of them the letter "C", there's the engineers who make six figures, and then there's everybody else.
A state that thrives on the glorification of implements of violence, considers the health of women and sexuality to be subordinate to religious beliefs, and education a luxury is one I'd consider regressive. Others certainly disagree: I would not want to live in communities where their voice has any political power, and the feeling is probably mutual. So this negative signal is a win-win.
No, it means that Texas only interferes in medical decisions, domestic decisions, childrearing, labor relations, and religion, and most other private aspects of your life.
Pretty much anything that isn't regulated by a private contract, really.
Good. Encouraging tech to diversify locations is a very effective solution to the demand-driven real-estate bubble that has been caused by the tech industry.
This is very interesting for me for a very different reason:
We're in Germany where this is taxed heavily. If you offer your employees free meals, this becomes part of their taxable income, so you actually have to give them a raise to even this out, and then you have employees that want to opt-out to get the hands on that cash...
I always wondered how Google Germany deals with this. There is a minimum below which it doesn't get taxed and specific items like coffee, water etc fall out of this, but it blew my mind the first time I was trying to set something like this up for our company.
What I’ve learned early: tax law is subject to negotiation. Depending how well your tax department connects and negotiates with the responsible tax office you can structure things like that.
They are in the US as well. There's some exception if you can make a case that it's for the employer's benefit, not the employee's. Everyone says it is, and no one tries very hard to tax it.
There have been occasional attempts to enforce the law - IRS recently made noises in 2014/15.
The challenge is that it's taxable to the employees but hard to track and prove, it's for relatively little money per employee, and the firms argue that it's for their benefit to secure information/improve productivity/build cohesion...
Google can and will fight far harder than the IRS is willing to on this issue and the IRS isn't entirely sure that they'd win. The IRS can spend resources in places to make a much higher return with an almost certain chance of success.
So no effective taxes on meals.
To make it happen in your company, follow the Google and Uber strategy. Just do it and deal with the law later.
Your ability to pay any fines later may be different from Google's and the chance that one of your employees will call the tax office on you may be dramatically higher because Germany.
How is it hard to prove? These companies offering free food is very well known. It's not like the food is in a back alley behind a heavy door you have to knock on and say, "Walt sent me".
The invoice the company pays for the meal. If cooked on-site, the bills for supplies and salary of the cooks, etc. These things are why companies are required to keep books of accounts.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadMy employer gives me free health care. Should that be restricted so I have to spend my own dollars and not get the benefit of a group plan?
Should employers not be allowed to give a transit subsidy because it hurts Lyft/Uber?
Maybe tech companies should not be allowed to offer stock based compensation because it's unfair to other city residents who work jobs without such things.
Your health care is not “free” it’s part of your compensation where the employer gets to choose how you’re compensated. I get healthcare via my wife’s insurance and I would much rather have the money.
In a sane society, your health care wouldn’t be tied to your employer.
I really hope Amazon's new HQ helps pave the way to start de-centralizing the tech industry from that one, overcrowded, and increasingly almost hostile spot.
The strips of bougie overpriced restaurants that haunt Palo Alto, MTV, and Sunnyvale are already getting it.
Do employees today get taxed on the value of the free food ? Why would that be different if it costs 1$ , and how do you define the value of the free food anyways ?
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-fringe-benefits...
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15b.pdf
In fact, you could just add a stipend to your paycheck, subtract a "food cost", and the food isn't free anymore.
None of the companies involved are even going to notice it.
It has no bearing on what sorts of non-speech activities you can regulate, even though they happen to involve money.
CU (and before it Buckley v. Valeo) stands (in relevant part) for the idea that the right to spend money on Constitutionally protected expression is itself part of the scope of the right protected. It's not “money is speech” but “the freedom to spend money on speech is part of the freedom of speech”; the former makes a better soundbite and can be a useful memory aid, but loses critical information if taken as the core message.
Next thing you know they're going to ban the office supply cabinet and if you need pens or paperclips you need to take a trip to the local Staples.
I don't think they have really thought this through though. For example, would this forbid a soupe kitchen that serves hot meals, how about a nursing home or a hospital?
There are fun loopholes though. Here's the text of the condition for facebook.
"CAFETERIA CONDITION: In order to foster synergy between office, restaurant, and retail uses in the Center and realize the economic vitality of the project, the project anticipates employees in the office space will utilize food and retail services available in the Center. The applicant will encourage tenants and employees of tenants to utilize food and retail services available in the Center. Neither the applicant nor tenant(s) will subsidize meals by more than fifty percent (50%) or provide free meals for employees in the office space on a regular daily basis. An employer can subsidize or pay for employee meals as long as they are patronizing restaurants in the Center.
In addition: The applicant may make a request to amend this condition. The City Manager or a designee may make a recommendation to the City Council on this matter."
So for example:
Facebook could open a restaurant in the center. If it does, it cannot legally choose to discriminate in who they serve (in california, anyway. In a lot of states you often can).
It can, however, legally price discriminate in various ways (AFAIK, if someone has case law otherwise, love to see it). This is in fact, quite common.
So for example, it could charge the public that walks in 1 million a meal. It could offer advance tickets to employees at no charge, and no one else.
This is also non-discriminatory on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin (which is what the 1964 civil rights act covers), disabilities (covering the ADA), etc.
I don't believe it would be found discriminatory to a protected class in most states (a lot of states add political affiliation, etc).
(this is just an example, and one i'm sure the IRS would have fun with :P)
How would that work for a huge complex like the Googleplex?
They'd have to provide public access to all parts of their complex to comply.
> So for example, it could charge the public that walks in 1 million a meal.
Not a lawyer, but I think that will break the law. Otherwise, "public access" will become completely meaningless: if I don't like you, all items on the menu are no $1m, and of course you cannot stay on premise without ordering...
I'd love to hear a real lawyer analyzing this, but imho, both your suggestions constitute attempts to completely circumvent a law based on technicalities, which is a dangerous game to play when you're a corporation with offices in the jurisdiction of the legislative body you're trying to circumvent.
Your simple solution will also not work for very large businesses (due to the need to open up their entire campus for public access), nor small ones (who can't afford the cost in funds and labor of creating a separate public-access restaurant).
In my estimation, this will make any company think twice about starting a big office in MTV.
Wow. Incredibly corrupt. I'm guessing next lunch boxes are going to be banned?
Unfortunately the suburbs are now hostile too: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/New-Facebook-Offices-M...
"So we have all these big tech companies opening offices in our town... How do we get more out of them... Let's force their employees to buy their food in local stores by banning free food... Let's tax them a bit more..."
Etc.
This will work in the short term, especially when some of these rules only apply to new offices.
It will fail on the long term, as more and more companies question the wisdom of setting up shops in the Valley and California in general, and move to locations with much lower tax and restrictions, such as Austin TX.
But that will only last a decade or two before they turn Austin (or wherever) into SF 2.0 and all the business goes elsewhere.
I don't think local government in Texas is as amenable to well-meaning but ultimately intrusive and disruptive policies like in Northern California.
California was never a hands-off state, never had the hands-off tradition that Texas had.
I don't see any reason to expect that the same stuff would happen in TX.
https://www.newsweek.com/abortion-texas-fetus-law-2017-57686...
That sounds like a success from the perspective of folks who don't want their suburb to turn into SF or Manhattan?
Instead of a suburban office location, they are actively encouraging urbanization: more restaurants, more commercial spaces in general, more residents.
Moreover, all these tech campuses represent the majority of the richest residents of suburbs like MTV, and the main reason they are rich and have good schools etc. It would be very odd if the community as a whole wanted all that gone, especially when techies are a large part of the community.
Finally, if MTV wanted to repel tech, there are much more effective ways to do that with legislation. For example, they could apply the legislation to existing offices.
So no, I don't believe this is part of some campaign to avert MTV turning into "Manhattan", which is not something that can happen in the foreseeable future anyway.
Also, the quality of ingredients and the creativity and care in preparation and presentation is significantly better than I've seen elsewhere, although the executive dining room at global HQ for one of the companies I worked for did rival Facebook or Google's typical cafe experience.
FB workers are rich, and they'll not want to eat every day in the caf, and they'll be out and about as much as they would otherwise.
The alternative won't be 'restos' it will be 'the microwave'.
And is trading your coworkers for pushy crowds of strangers and traffic nightmares really that good of a deal? Because in MTV, that's what you're trading for. Getting away from work at lunch means dealing with even bigger and even more annoying crowds.
... but in reality there are hardly any jobs that are so directly equal.
I used to always 'go for the money' when I was younger, but now ... all the other factors matter so much. Just the temperament of your direct reports matter so much. One fewer headache a week? What's that worth? A lot :)
Meals are a nice thing, but relatively small in the equation, at least compared to all the things related to the job ... and I find the food more a matter of convenience than anything. Personally, I'd be happy with free microwave burritos on those 'I'm busy' days, but that's just me.
Free food isnt just about the food. Its also the convenience. I already have to fight traffic getting to work, and I fight through the crowds any time I go shopping or anywhere remotely popular in the area. Having to deal with that madness in the middle of a work day when I just want a meal would certainly be a dealbreaker for me.
And from my understanding, you wouldn't get any free microwave burritos -- those would be illegal.
As much as I dislike some of the big tech cos and the TechBros working there bragging about the free food all the time, I still believe a company should be able to decide if they want to offer food or not.
Restaurants were unable to turn a profit, so they lobbied successfully and now everyone beside them got a worse outcome.
This is economy 101. A highly visible group of people lobbied hard (in this case the restaurants), and they put a small burden on everyone else to have their issue resolved. However when you calculate the outcome, the burden on everyone else is bigger than the gain that the highly visible group got out of it. Everyone is worse off.
Or rather, 'economy 101' is that anyone with enough leverage, will use monopoly powers in one area, to take control of an adjacent economy.
American Oil empires were not built on some new amazing way to get at oil, it was because some had control of the railroads, and charged their competitors a little more to transport therefore putting them out of business (through aggressive consolidation).
The FB cafeteria example is not a very good one admittedly, but an alternative could be 'they buy up all the restaurants in the area and make them exclusively available for FB staff'. Which they very well could do, and it would then seem kind of crazy, no?
Economically speaking, it would be 'above bar'. After all, 'free market', right? If neighbourhood residents want to eat in a restaurant, screw them, they can go across town!
We live in communities, not economies.
The city ordinance is stupid, but the motivation is not.
Ironically, these are 'rich people problems' ... the kinds of things that happen when little dots of wealth blow up and there is a huge economic inequality, even if most people are 'kind of well off'.
If Facebook is willing to pay substantial amounts of money for a restaurant, while at the same time guaranteeing customers to those who refuse to sell, it would seem the number of public restaurants in the area will explode.
The 'wealth inequality' issue is obviously a problem, so the government mandates that 'all citizens get meal chits' as part of their comp - this is to ensure that Monegasque folks literally are not priced out of food.
But everyone gets them - bankers included (the uber-rich don't work ...). So you go into a restaurant there and these dudes in $5K suits are pulling out their 'meal cards' to pay for stuff, it's kind of funny.
But it has to be that way.
If facebook et. al. has set up their own 'shuttle bus' system, there's no reason to believe they won't set up 'private restaurants' around town to get around the city's regulations, which will sure to cause even more angst and obvious concern.
Better to just let them have their cafeterias ... but the weird kind of inequality thing is not going to go away.
If there are ten restaurants and one of them is pretty much the default choice for 25% of the people, that leaves the rest of the restaurants with an effective 75% of the market, which shrinks their customer base quite a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE
(On the other hand, in societies where everyone is poor, there can be peace.)
i think it has more to do with dignity.
i think it has more to do with dignity.
Those two are the same thing. Dignity == not being at the absolute bottom end of a dominance hierarchy.
Since human society is very complex, there are many somewhat orthogonal dominance hierarchies. That revered old statesman in your esoteric music fandom might be a school janitor somewhere. Those local-star music scene musicians might get ushered into a billionaire's party through the back door of the kitchen, then be strictly warned not to touch any of the food.
to be treated with dignity would be for the billionaire’s staff to escort the low status individuals with grace and provide food for them in a way that affords them respect while satisfying whatever other constraint which precludes the billionaire from involving these persons in the main event.
to risk ruining my point by being petty: sounds like a billionaire with no class.
Tribes constantly warred with each other, because they saw that as a good way to get resources.
Of course, during the middle ages it was feudalism, which was not centralized at all, it was stratified. Classes, classes, classes. Haves and have not-s. The haves of course arranged things in a way to keep what they have, so they come up with rights for themselves, which were very much not egalitarian ones.
And of course there's the real centralized one-party autocratic setup, where instead of noble houses openly competing with each other, people just play the subtle game of extort those who are under you, which makes inequality even worse.
This is a relatively recent phenomenon. To have oppression, there has to be enough of a surplus for a ruling class to extract. For many 10's of thousands of years, our ancestors didn't have the means to have a surplus.
Also, we have many examples of local societies which are egalitarian, but embedded within a larger, distant feudal hierarchy. In some of those cases, there can be very little violence directed locally, though in other cases, people can be so low in society, again, their only hope for advancement is violence.
Where there have been increases in the general standard of living, it has been through the adoption of new technology and the increase of trade.
The City already tries to foster community by forcing people to share space against their will, via public transit. It's a dystopian hellscape, not a community. You can't just build those by force.
This is Civic Center Station, which serves Twitter, Uber, and Square. No amount of tech worker foot traffic is going to clean up an area if the government isn't willing to police it.
Video doesn't even show the worst part, but helps to illustrate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gT5NULvRSk
And policing will just drive the problem somewhere else. What America desperately needs is a new approach to a lot of issues that goes way beyond ever more police, courts and jails:
- drugs and addictions (now that enough white middle class people suffer from heroin or worse, something hopefully will be done beyond the "put them all in prison" attitude that caused the War on Drugs in the first place)
- mental health resources, whose lack of is directly affecting or even causing much of the homeless population
- medical resources
- housing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COduXp6Cw3g
[0] San Francisco welcomes the downtrodden from everywhere in the world; it's not enough to solve poverty in the US to clean up SF's streets; you must eradicate it from every inch of the Earth.
The array of policy, economics, and values that make Germany and Japan work so well are not going to magically appear in an American city just because you try to cargo-cult some of their second-order effects. Public space in those countries is genuinely good; you don’t have to ban alternatives to get people to use it.
Only problem I've encountered on public transport on 5 continents is the occasional drunk group singing on Friday night.
That's shocking to me. Get city policy in there if the commuter cops can't handle it.
NYC cops be in there removing people stat if this happened here.
The companies would have owned the property, and making the meal cost at least 30% cheaper.
... while they hand out hundreds of thousands of free needles that end up on the street, among shit.
It's better than the alternative, which is people sharing needles and giving each other all sorts of diseases.
Not only do they hand out free needles though, but also free sharps containers, and there are needle disposal bins all over the place for users to drop their used needles in.
I'm not sure how they convinced all the heroin users to dispose of their needles correctly, but they've done a fairly good job. It's rare for me to see a needle on the street.
""CAFETERIA CONDITION: In order to foster synergy between office, restaurant, and retail uses in the Center and realize the economic vitality of the project, the project anticipates employees in the office space will utilize food and retail services available in the Center. The applicant will encourage tenants and employees of tenants to utilize food and retail services available in the Center. Neither the applicant nor tenant(s) will subsidize meals by more than fifty percent (50%) or provide free meals for employees in the office space on a regular daily basis. An employer can subsidize or pay for employee meals as long as they are patronizing restaurants in the Center.
In addition: The applicant may make a request to amend this condition. The City Manager or a designee may make a recommendation to the City Council on this matter."
One thing they should do in my opinion is make the place more pedestrian friendly. Maybe they could replace the big parking lots that create sprawl with denser garages?
When I worked at a company that offered free lunch, the company used it to help build rapport and camaraderie among the coworkers. It's one time during the day when the entire team can sit down and eat lunch together and get to know about each other, which is not possible through Slack nor via meetings. Just hanging out with everyone on the team, talking about the latest Marvel movie or Star wars, etc. It was also about convenience as well as reducing stress and decisions on an already-busy day.
If the team still wants to do lunch together everyday at an outside restaurant, it would not be easy, especially the logistics, which would be a nightmare -- getting everyone to agree on one place where everyone likes their food, finding a place that can seat the entire group at a single table, finding transportation / assigning driver/riders if it's beyond walking distance, and having to divide the check afterward (or Venmo), etc. Just for a meal that lasts no more than an hour, top.
I stopped bringing my lunch to work and go out to eat specifically to get a break from my coworkers. Not that there is anything wrong with my coworkers, but I really enjoy the alone time in the middle of the day where I can just sit back and read.
Miracles do happen.
The upstream comment even said free lunch "promoted" camaraderie, not "is the only way it can happen."
Rationally, there’s no inherent reason that free lunches promote “bonding”, and no inherent reason that teams that go out to lunch won’t bond. It’s just cargo culting and post hoc rationalization for people liking free food.
Intellectual rigor is alive and well on HN.
It is not nightmare, it is pretty easy thing to do and friends groups in work do it almost daily without any problem.
It worked fine most of the time and you don't eat with the same ppl every day, so you get to know colleagues from neighboring teams as well...
I get that this is localized in an area that has companies that probably offer better benefits than most others, but the idea of restricting benefits at all seems ludicrous to me
The regulation treadmill never stops, there's always a need to introduce new regulation to fix things broken by the previous regulation.
To the barricades!
I had expected it would be over taxes.
From the photos and description in the article and elsewhere, it looks like you can get full meals for free, meals that would cost at least $10 if bought at retail.
An employee who took two meals a day at the free company cafeteria every working day would be getting a benefit worth almost $5000/year. That's equivalent to something like an extra $8000/year salary.
I believe that food provided to employees is normally not taxable for the employee, and is actually deductible as a business expense by the employer (but I've not looked into how the recent major tax changes may have affected that), but I think that was intended for things like where employees have to remain available for emergencies during meal periods, or where meal breaks are too short to allow employees time to go get food, and things like that.
The term of art is that the meals have to be provided for the employer's convenience. In the short meal break case, for example, providing meals is for the employer's convenience because it saves them from having to offer longer meal breaks.
Meals offered for things like goodwill, morale, or attracting employees are not considered to be for the employer's convenience, but are still OK if they are de minimis. So things like donuts, soft drinks, meals when employees have to take occasional overtime, the occasional company party or picnic, and things like that are fine.
Putting in a cafeteria that offers free full meals to all employees all the time probably is not de minimis. It may not actually violate tax laws, but if it does not it is pushing the limits hard so I'd certainly not be surprised to see attempts to crack down from that angle.
So the real value is probably more like $2, and even at two full meals per day that would translate to 200 working days times $4 is about $800.
A better way to think of it would be how much it would cost otherwise, and it's $10. So the calculation of annual value is pretty much there.
Forcing workers out of the office without their consent seems disingenuous. Travel expenses can be a burden, and such travel can cause disruption in areas where rideshare services may be flaky and increasingly dangerous to passengers.
The increase of food trucks is, on average, perhaps providing office workers with less nutritious food options which they have less control over (especially compared to big tech office cafes).
Increasing use of outside food establishments increases the 'lunch commute', adding to already-insane traffic, pollution, and stress for workers who already commute too much.
On the plus side, this may create increased demand for lunch spots, however it is increasingly difficult for them to operate while providing affordable prices for healthy food, and I don't think the increased demand would truly offset this effect, but rather could have negative effects on the workers caught in the middle.
I live and work in the downtown part of San Jose, and on some days of the week work in downtown SF (SoMa near Caltrain).
I rarely spend $12-15 (more so in SJ but also in SF). Usually the significant cost is adding a soft drink of some sort (soda, juice, tea, etc.) because I'm finding restaurants are increasing the price of those for whatever reason ($2.50 at some).
Definitely wouldn't say $10 for a full meal is "unrealistically low". Perhaps it's really a matter of choice. Some people prefer to get lunch often from New American restaurants and similar where you need to tip, etc. Some don't mind going to simpler places like a taco truck around the corner, or Panera Bread/Chipotle/etc. (although I will easily admit Panera's cost has increasingly gotten more expensive, as you describe).
Soft drinks are easy money. Receive, unpack, refrigerate,sell.
A soft drink that costs $0.10 to buy in a store and sells for $2.5. That's a 2500% profit margin.
If the delivery system is not a bottled/canned productbut comes in a keg, and can deliver 50 litres instead of 330ml then the margin is higher.
Of course the expenses of electricity, storage, labor, remain, but it makes a sweeter deal for the restoranteur to employ their staff for 10% of the time with 2500% margin.
I remember watching Gordon Ramsay in many of his episodes stating that restos are/should be operating with a 25% margin.
That being said, Apple pays people peanuts down there, $32k/yr as a contractor ain't much.
This is a problem across the entire tech industry. When it comes to staff and employees who don't have three letters following their name, one of them the letter "C", there's the engineers who make six figures, and then there's everybody else.
Pretty much anything that isn't regulated by a private contract, really.
I didn't realize Texas had instituted soda and straw taxes.
We're in Germany where this is taxed heavily. If you offer your employees free meals, this becomes part of their taxable income, so you actually have to give them a raise to even this out, and then you have employees that want to opt-out to get the hands on that cash...
I always wondered how Google Germany deals with this. There is a minimum below which it doesn't get taxed and specific items like coffee, water etc fall out of this, but it blew my mind the first time I was trying to set something like this up for our company.
There have been occasional attempts to enforce the law - IRS recently made noises in 2014/15.
The challenge is that it's taxable to the employees but hard to track and prove, it's for relatively little money per employee, and the firms argue that it's for their benefit to secure information/improve productivity/build cohesion...
Google can and will fight far harder than the IRS is willing to on this issue and the IRS isn't entirely sure that they'd win. The IRS can spend resources in places to make a much higher return with an almost certain chance of success.
So no effective taxes on meals.
To make it happen in your company, follow the Google and Uber strategy. Just do it and deal with the law later.
Your ability to pay any fines later may be different from Google's and the chance that one of your employees will call the tax office on you may be dramatically higher because Germany.
But free benefits are not considered income?
I don't see the difference between the two.
Health is the most tax advantaged, and then retirement. Comes from WWII era rules aimed to prevent wage increases.