The statistic I heard was $20/day. And there have been cutbacks over the years -- one day they removed a lot of the more exotic snacks and replaced them with bi

The statistic I heard was $20/day. And there have been cutbacks over the years -- one day they removed a lot of the more exotic snacks and replaced them with bigger bins of bulk cereals. Oh, the outrage on internal mailing lists that day! Google's cafes are so efficient so I wonder how much the labor really adds to the cost. You have chefs and line workers that could work in a high-end restaurant, so salaries are higher, but it's all set up for maximum throughput, so perhaps that makes it cheap. For example, at Yahoo's cafes, there's a lot of made-to-order stuff. You end up waiting up to 10 minutes sometimes, and there are lineups. Everything at Google is premade food done buffet style, or self-serve, like a sandwich bar. At Yahoo I have waited for a long time for someone else to make the sandwich, and sometimes that person doesn't speak English well enough for me to make her understand that no, I don't actually want meat in the sandwich. The Google taqueria is made-to-order, but that is run like an assembly line and you add your own condiments at the end. In the boldest move, Google does away with the checkout line too, which makes throughput incredibly fast. Finally, for whatever reason, Googlers are more conscientious about cleaning their plates before returning them to the cafe. Yahoo has the same sorts of prominently placed garbage cans, but nobody seems to use them. The only reason that getting food at Google might take you more than 3 minutes are a) lines -- a growing problem b) indecision because everything looks so great. Caveat: this is my experience circa 2005-6.