The risk of instituting a new perk isn't the cost over the first N months -- it's the impact on morale, PR, etc. if you ever decide to take it away. Restaurant

The risk of instituting a new perk isn't the cost over the first N months -- it's the impact on morale, PR, etc. if you ever decide to take it away. Restaurants have "special pricing promotions" to set the expectation that the "lower price" perk won't be around forever (and to motivate people by through the creation of temporal scarcity). During the perk period, the restaurant gets more people in the door by offering a better deal. Google's perk cycle is opposite that of a restaurant. During good times, they have to make working there really attractive. But, right now, they don't have to give away so much, so they can scale back. The problem is that the expectation was explicitly set high (think about the IPO owner's manual).