5 ms·
There's no such thing as a free lunch (or dinner or breakfast) - these costs are factored into salaries.
by aichcon 17y ago
There's no such thing as a free lunch (or dinner or breakfast) - these costs are factored into salaries.
- bigbang 17y agoAnd providing free breakfast,lunch and dinner would force people to stay longer at work. Ofcourse its thier choice, but its not easy for an average human to refuse something "free":) By providing a meal worth, Google can get atleast 1-2 hours extra work hours from an employee.
- Tamerlin 17y agoWhich is exactly the wrong attitude. Any company that emphasizes how long the employees are working in this industry is clearly misguided. The correct goal should be how much is the employee accomplishing, not how long his ass is stuck in that seat.
- cma 17y agoDoes the employer write off the lunches, etc. as an expense? Does the employee have to pay taxes on the cost of the food, preparation space, etc.? If yes to the first and no to the second, sounds very much like a (partially) free lunch to me.
- jjs 17y agoWhat's to prevent the company form writing off the perk and counting it against the employee's "real" salary?
- jrockway 17y agoWhat prevents that? "The market." If your employees start feeling like you are fucking them over, they are just going to leave.
- jjs 17y agoThere is indeed often a mismatch between how the company feels a given benefit should be valued by the employee and how the employee actually values it. Complicating matters is the fact that the company wants to provide benefits that provide greater utility to the employee than the cost to the company, but smart employees will take that into account.
- anamax 17y agoIf "food" is a line-item on the paycheck stub, it's not free. If it's not a line-item, the only way to count it against salary is to have line items that don't add up, which falls under the category of "my paycheck is wrong".
- jjs 17y agoBy "real" salary, I mean the notional salary that the company would have to pay were it not providing benefits.
- anamax 17y agoWhat does "counting" against "notional salary" mean? Different kinds of expenses (benefits and salaries are expenses) have different tax consequences. Things that are on the pay stub may be taxed differently than things that aren't but I don't think that you're going there. Are you thinking that telling employees "here's how much I'm spending on you that doesn't appear on your pay-stub" is going to have some effect? If so, I suspect that you're about to learn that some folks would rather have that money in their paycheck and that most will tune you out.
- jjs 17y ago> What does "counting" against "notional salary" mean? Offering benefits allows both companies and employees to agree on a lower cash salary; it's in the company's interest to provide benefits that have a large perceived value for minimum cost, whereas it's in the employee's best interest to only offset his desired salary by no more than the amount that the benefit would cost him were he to purchase it individually.