Trick is, much of the business world is measured by (and thus optimized for) quantifiable short-term impact. The short term positive impact of cutting out snac

Trick is, much of the business world is measured by (and thus optimized for) quantifiable short-term impact. The short term positive impact of cutting out snacks is immediate and obvious. The costs are less obvious and longer term. Do enough long-term planning in a place like that and people start getting tired of long-term answers to short-term numbers not moving. Further complicating this stuff: say a 'good' CFO saw the value in a snack budget and implemented one where it didn't exist before. How do you even measure the impact of the improved work that goes along with improved morale? How do you credit a manager for nixing a 'cut the snack budget' suggestion? How do you measure the negatives that were never incurred? It's very easy to see 'cut snacks, saved 10k; 3 engineers got the wake-up call, grumbled about 'stuff like this' and left, 4 projects now behind". It's pretty tricky to ever say "this project is now on track because we added a food budget and put in a foosball table". [1] [1] Which is why those items tend to be focused on as recruitment expenses. It's simply easier to measure/justify in that context. Which is also why they tend to go away when the company reaches that size where further staffing is composed primarily of employees coming from jobs that also do not have snacks and games, so their necessity for recruitment is basically gone.