From tiny companies of five people, to huge companies of five hundred thousand, I have never worked in an office where you couldn't get a brew.
But then, I am British. Take the tea away and it's riots (or at the least some quiet complaining)
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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I wish people would drink more tea and less lead around here.
As someone who works in an electronics plant, there are definitely days where I just crave a nice refreshing slurp from the leaded solder pot.
Where I work used to have free coffee and tea until a newspaper made a story about how we were lazy and spent all our time drinking coffee and wasting money so my organization fully removed complimentary beverages ever since. The floor warden walks around with a bucket collecting change and donations to get new hand soap in the kitchen. It’s so annoying.
That's such garbage!
Worked for an American Fortune 100 company that had a community funded coffee station when I started. Got a tiny styrofoam cup of Folgers coffee for $0.25. Eventually they had stations that provided free coffee, but that was years later.
Does this company start with I and end with BM
It does not!
Nah, the NSA takes very good care of its employees. They get free everything.
I worked for an Utah based company that opened a Boston office. There was a holy war over our office being allowed to use our snack budget on a coffee machine and beans. Mormons vs Bostonians, the culture war nobody expected
As it should be. If Intel is spending that much, that better be Yorkshire Gold.
"Some of these include free fruit and beverages, fitness coaches in the gym, a sabbatical after four years with the company, and the grounding of the Intel Air Shuttle that flies between California, Arizona, and Oregon."
I think, if anything, one of those things was main driver of the cost here... You make this fucking list with a straight face? But you go get rid of the tea bags to discipline labor, you fucking cowards.
Have company that completely depends on people using their brains to solve problems.
Give these people free stimulants for years so you can extract extra value out of their brains.
Stop giving them stimulants.
Brain workers are now cranky and stimulant deprived. Surely this will make them more effective…
Give brain workers stimulants again, because fucking obviously.
Fucking real? Every tech job I've ever had has had free everything! Everything! Snacks, nuts, power bars, trail mix, yogurts, eggs, cereal, cappuccinos, beer, wine, you name it. Intel thinks they're going to be competitive with some free coffee and tea, which is free at even the lowest level office jobs? Get real!
Dear wage slave: the free snacks (and the private jet) are costing too much, we need to cut back because we are struggling.
Going forward I'll refer to Intel as a government owned company. That's their future anyways.
Coffee will continue until morale improves.
Employers figured out years ago that caffeine has excellent ROI for productivity. (Amphetamines are probably a close second, but we won't talk about that right now.)
For Intel to cut basic morale boosters was just pure silliness.
Counterpoint: 100 million for coffee in a year sounds astronomical, even for the 120k employees intel has. Like, what are they paying for, doordash starbucks?
The headline is bullshit. The 100 million is for all food/drink services, not just coffee.
And an air shuttle for the executives...
Actually the air shuttle service was available to all employees assuming 1) They had an existing route for your source/destination 2) It was a valid business reason they would be paying travel expenses for anyways.
Edit: But your implied point that it probably cost a lot of money is true.
$2.5 a day per employee? not too bad I feel
That’s $3.33 per employee per work day, assuming 50 5-day weeks per year. Seems a bit high to me, but not exorbitant. If the figure included things that they’re not reinstating (like free fruit) then that would make sense.
You can get over 500g of ground coffee for that price. It absolutely is exorbitant
That does not include the machines that make it on demand which you kinda need for an office that size nor servicing them which you ABSOLUTELY need.
It's still overpriced like all service contracts are....but my office would riot if we replaced the machines with traditional brewers. Nobody wants to make (or wait for) coffee at the office. And nobody wants to drink the nasty burnt liquid when it's been sitting there all day
500 grams of what, though? Folgers?
The current average price per pound (454 grams) of ground coffee beans in the US was double that just a couple months ago, so spending $3.00 per pound would necessitate getting cheaper than average - and therefore, likely lower quality than average, or at least lower perceived quality than average - beans.
The sorts of beans that companies tend to stock (IME) that are perceived as higher quality aren’t the same brands that I tend to buy (generally from local roasters), but they’re comparably priced. For a 5 pound (2267 grams) bag of one of their blends (which are roughly half the price of their higher end beans), it’s similar to what you’d pay for 5 pounds of Starbucks beans - about $50-$60.
Often when a company says “free coffee,” they don’t mean “free batch-brewed drip coffee,” but rather, free espresso beverages, potentially in a machine (located in the break room) that automates the whole process. I assume that’s what Intel is doing.
At $10 per pound (16 ounces) and roughly 1 ounce (28 grams) of beans per two ounce pour of espresso, that means that if each person on average drinks two per day, then that’s $1.25 for coffee per person per day.
However, logistics costs (delivering coffee to all the company’s break rooms) and operational costs (the cost of the automatic machine and repairs, at minimum; or the cost of baristas, or adding the responsibility to someone’s existing job (and thus needing more people or more hours) if just batch brewing) have to be added on top of that. Then add in the cost of milk, milk alternatives, sweeteners, cups, lids, stir sticks, etc..
Obviously if they just had free coffee grounds and let people handle the actual brewing of coffee in the break room, it would be much cheaper. But if the goal is to improve morale, having higher quality coffee that people don’t have to make themselves is going to do that better.
For $100M/yr why not start your own coffee subsidiary?
and then we'll yank that shit again so our board can be paid more money that they don't need, and can never spend!
How many employees does Intel have!? We have a free coffee program that I manage at my work and it works out to $35k USD per year. Granted we only have about 1200 employees, but scale it up to 120,000 and it’s still 3.5mil.
The headline isn't telling a full story
Some of these include free fruit and beverages, fitness coaches in the gym, a sabbatical after four years with the company, and the grounding of the Intel Air Shuttle that flies between California, Arizona, and Oregon.
$100M a year is about $274k per day on food and drinks.
That's like only one yacht per year for the exec managing the program though, try being more considerate for our elite next time you critize something.
That is like $3 a day per employee.
Have you seen the price of half'n half? I bet that is where the budget goes.
Gotta refinance a mortgage to afford half'n'half or milk.
The other half is tariffs! 🤪
So I was a GM for a FS company's account for an Investment Firm in Seattle for awhile, and for some reason they wanted me to pay the coffee account through my company credit card. Okie, dokie.
There were 3 floors of Starbucks coffee machines that ground and brewed each individual cup, and the hoppers on top held 2-3lbs (I forget). So that was min. 4 machines per floor, plus the C suite and catering, all the coffee we bought was from the same vendor. Now the kicker was, NONE of the storage cabinets in the break rooms had locks, so the employees were walking off with a veritable shit ton of free, premium coffee beans.
My CC had originally the standard 5k credit limit...and with everything else I needed to purchase that wasn't going to be enough for the month, so I got the regional comptroller to get the limit increased...and then again....and then again.
We spent about 12-15k per month on just coffee (at our cost) which would translate to about 50k in sales to the company.
[Bonus bit: My CC limit ended up at a 35k limit which I kept after I left that account.... nobody believed me that it was so high. I was a superstar doing openings when we needed to get new kitchen equipment that day and we rolled out to the local restaurant supply store and bought it on the card...at the end of my time with that company I was at a bitch of an account and stopped doing my monthly reconciliation report, to the tune of 6-7 months and over 250k of charges that they were screaming at me to get the receipts turned in....and to be honest I was out of fucks to give, and they made us use a new system that was absolutely a huge piece of time sucking shit].
"The beatings will continue until morale improves."
That's just a drop in the buchet in stock buybacks per year