Question about eating meals at work

[Zanza]

Agree 100%.  400 years later and Yuros still act like serfs, waiting for a barrel of mead and a couple sheep from their liege to celebrate the solstice.

Has anyone read Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom?"  I haven't, but it does seem logical that that the reason this mentality has been able to survive is that it was given an intellectual patina by socialists and unionists.

Because no cutting-edge, admired American company would ever pamper their employees like that, right? I bet that if you look up those "best companies to work for" lists, you will find a lot of those free perks and services among these very top employers in America.

Google's Ginormous Free Food Budget: $7,530 Per Googler, $72 Million A Year*
Sick of hearing about the great, free, food at Google? Skip this post. Want to know how much it costs Google to pay for all that grub? Read on.
Here's the math: Googlers in the U.S. get two meals a day free, according to the jobs page, but people we talk to at the Mountain View Googleplex tell us employees there are often chowing down three times a day. Google is open 251 days a year. So let's say that Google is providing about 600 meals per year, per employee.
By its own count, Google has about 8,000 workers at the Googleplex in Mountain View, and another 700 at the office on Ninth Ave. in New York City. Buying DoubleClick netted Google 900 more U.S. employees (after laying off 300). So that's a total of about 9,600 employees in Mountain View, New York, and from DoubleClick.
The rest of Google's American employees get fed, but Google doesn't break down employment for its other offices. Internationally, benefits vary -- employees in Australia get a free lunch, whereas employees in Ireland get a fully subsidized canteen.
Cost per employee? San Jose-based caterer Abe Caterman (really!) guesses it would cost Google about $15 per day, per employee, for breakfast and lunch. But Prentiss Hall, a helpful exec at Aramark Business Dining Services, thinks Google could be spending closer to $30 a day, based on the quality and level of service the company provides.*
So we multiplied the $30/day by the 9,600 employees in Mountain View and New York by the 251 days Google is open every year. Remember that Google probably spends a lot more than this, because there are employees outside those offices, and because visitors are there all the time eating. (One friend at Google tells us that a number of Mozilla employees treat the cafeteria as their own.)
The grand total: By our guesstimate, Larry and Sergey are spending at least $72,288,000 per year to fill their workers' pie-holes. How can they afford to do that? Easy, of course: Last year Google (GOOG) earned $4.2 billion.
*UPDATE: A knowledgeable source puts Google's actual per-head food cost closer to $20/day, with Google's amazing snack/coffee/fruit/power-bar/drink bars accounting for a significant chunk of that (no surprise here--we'd abscond with at least $20-a-day worth from the bars alone). Since our original calculation didn't include any of the free grub Google doles out to its international employees, however, the overall estimate is probably reasonable. - HB

http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/4/googles-ginormous-food-budget-7530-per-googler

[Josquius]

Yeah, you're an idiot.

Nope, you're just hopelessly provincial.

[garbon]

Yeah, you're an idiot.

Nope, you're just hopelessly provincial.

Haha. Now that's ironic. I do believe you were the one insisting 12 pounds is more than sufficient and on your definition of dinner from your little speck in England being better.

[garbon]

Because no cutting-edge, admired American company would ever pamper their employees like that, right? I bet that if you look up those "best companies to work for" lists, you will find a lot of those free perks and services among these very top employers in America.

As far as I know that comes with the dreadful bit that they'd like to spend more time than the average individual working (not scuttling about running your own errands) and then on positive - as a morale booster.

My old company gave me bagels once a week - it wasn't because they wanted to take care of but rather it made them look nice (as well as getting us straight in without a stop to pickup breakfast on Monday mornings).

[Admiral Yi]

Because no cutting-edge, admired American company would ever pamper their employees like that, right? I bet that if you look up those "best companies to work for" lists, you will find a lot of those free perks and services among these very top employers in America.

I'm sorry if I gave the impression that perks don't exist in American work places at all.

But I still think a generalization can be made about differing mentalities.  Any politician who proposed legally mandated lunch money in the States would be laughed at.  People who think that the absence of lunch money is proof of the lack of testicular fortitude among American workers are in the distinct minority.  I think most folks in the US realize that any freebies you get at work come out of the cash portion of your compensation.  Whereas Martim seems to be expressing the notion that free lunch is just "found money."  The only thing holding everyone in the world from getting free lunch is greedy owners and unequal power.  It's not all that different from the mentality you see with austerity protesters in Greece and elsewhere.

Verrrry tangentially related, read a good quote in The Economist from some former Luxembourgois finance minister: "We all know the right thing to do, the problem is none of us know how to get re-elected after doing the right thing."

[Brazen]

No.
But getting food from somewhere reasonable should only cost about 5 quid a time at the most (that would be a big spend for me).

You've never lived in a city centre with a high cost of living. My last two trips were to Paris (on an industrial estate) and Brussels (city centre) and breakfast wasn't included in the hotel. With 7am starts I was hardly going to catch the Metro to the nearest 7-11 to grab a bite. One day I only ate free exhibition food from the expo stands then peanut M&Ms from the machine for dinner with warm mineral water from the bottle I'd brought from home as there was no restaurant near my hotel within budget. Not good.

On Fridays when I don't bring a packed lunch to work, yeah, even in central London I can eat well for £5.

[Josquius]

Yeah, you're an idiot.

Nope, you're just hopelessly provincial.

Haha. Now that's ironic. I do believe you were the one insisting 12 pounds is more than sufficient and on your definition of dinner from your little speck in England being better.

Not at all. I recognise the interesting routes of the word and that it has different meanings in different places.
You however come over "Oh mah gawd, to some folks dinner don't mean dinner? You're stupid"

[dps]

Yeah, you're an idiot.

Nope, you're just hopelessly provincial.

Haha. Now that's ironic. I do believe you were the one insisting 12 pounds is more than sufficient and on your definition of dinner from your little speck in England being better.

Not at all. I recognise the interesting routes of the word and that it has different meanings in different places.
You however come over "Oh mah gawd, to some folks dinner don't mean dinner? You're stupid"

You were the one confused by the definition of the term, "dinner", not Garbon.  While that may not make you an idiot, knowing the definition certainly doesn't make him provincial.

[Martinus]

No.
But getting food from somewhere reasonable should only cost about 5 quid a time at the most (that would be a big spend for me).

You've never lived in a city centre with a high cost of living. My last two trips were to Paris (on an industrial estate) and Brussels (city centre) and breakfast wasn't included in the hotel. With 7am starts I was hardly going to catch the Metro to the nearest 7-11 to grab a bite. One day I only ate free exhibition food from the expo stands then peanut M&Ms from the machine for dinner with warm mineral water from the bottle I'd brought from home as there was no restaurant near my hotel within budget. Not good.

On Fridays when I don't bring a packed lunch to work, yeah, even in central London I can eat well for £5.

Oh I fully agree that special rules should apply when the expenses are incurred by an employee in connection with a business trip. Whenever we travel anywhere on business, we get the costs of our meals reimbursed to us by the firm - even if someone could make an argument that we would have to eat anyway if we stayed home, the firm recognizes that there are a lot of practicalities involved that make such reimbursement sensible.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Because no cutting-edge, admired American company would ever pamper their employees like that, right? I bet that if you look up those "best companies to work for" lists, you will find a lot of those free perks and services among these very top employers in America.

I'm sorry if I gave the impression that perks don't exist in American work places at all.

But I still think a generalization can be made about differing mentalities.  Any politician who proposed legally mandated lunch money in the States would be laughed at.  People who think that the absence of lunch money is proof of the lack of testicular fortitude among American workers are in the distinct minority.  I think most folks in the US realize that any freebies you get at work come out of the cash portion of your compensation.  Whereas Martim seems to be expressing the notion that free lunch is just "found money."  The only thing holding everyone in the world from getting free lunch is greedy owners and unequal power.  It's not all that different from the mentality you see with austerity protesters in Greece and elsewhere.

Verrrry tangentially related, read a good quote in The Economist from some former Luxembourgois finance minister: "We all know the right thing to do, the problem is none of us know how to get re-elected after doing the right thing."

This is why I can never be a Dem. While the growing irrationality of the GOP has forced a lot of rational economic conservatives and moderates into the Democratic party, there is still far too much of a vein of belief in "found money" and "free lunches" when it comes to the Democrats. Too many people that think you can raise taxes on corporations and the only people who pay are the billionaires.

[CountDeMoney]

Too many people that think you can raise taxes on corporations and the only people who pay are the billionaires.

There's a difference between the government taking it out on corporations and billionaires, and the corporations and billionaires subsequently taking their angst out on their employees.

[Eddie Teach]

Too many people that think you can raise taxes on corporations and the only people who pay are the billionaires.

It takes a bigger chunk from them than raising a similar amount via income tax.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The corporate tax rate is a little more complicated than that, though. On the one hand, corporate ownership is muddled. Lots of corporations have large employee ownership positions for example. Other corporations have various mutual funds that hold large stakes in them, the various owners of the mutual fund often include thousands if not millions of middle class people not to mention entities like public pension funds that invest in mutual funds that hold ownership in corporations.

So even if the pain for corporate taxes were felt by the ownership, that ownership is not necessarily who you think it is (sometimes it is, of course.) In addition, at least some economists like Harvard's Mankiw, have argued that functionally corporate taxes in reality tend to work like an excise tax on that company's business which means (while it may hurt the business) the ultimate payer is always the customer of that business.

The fairest way to do taxes has nothing to do with rates and all these different points of collection. We should start with figuring out what share of the tax burden each quintile of tax payers should be responsible for, and then figuring out from there how to make it happen. That gets heavily obfuscated by all the deductions we have, which should be capped at some absolute amount. Corporate taxes in particular are particularly retarded, with deductions that massively favor certain types of business to the detriment of others. Many corporations, very large Fortune 500 ones, pay no tax because they are eligible for tons of deductions. Other corporations are lucky to get much if any deductions. Many "new industry" type corporations like IT companies often are ones paying almost the maximum statutory rate, as most of the deductions are geared towards manufacturing or resource extraction. It'd probably make a lot more sense to have lower corporate tax rates (ours are the highest in the world) and significantly limited or simply removed corporate tax rate deductions--which would move our "effective corporate tax rate" more in line with global standards. [Our statutory rate is typically cited as the world's highest, but our corporations actually pay, as a share of total corporate revenue, among the lowest in the world...so our statutory rates are both too high and essentially meaningless, they should be lower and more indicative of what corporations will actually pay.]

[Zanza]

This tradition does not view an employee as merely a contractor of the employer, but someone the employer should care for and protect (and someone who, like a feudal client or, in more paternalistic and "benevolent" interpretations, a slave, is simply less smart than the employer, and as such should be guided and have some decisions taken for him).

Ultimately, this is pseudo-feudal and such fringe benefits (other allowances include often stuff like clothes you need for work - even if it is just a suit - or a holiday allowance, a special allowance granted on the birth of children, or marriage, or funeral in the family and so on and so forth) that are not seen as a "real pay" (and thus are not taxed or are taxed differently) are a perfect example of this mentality.

To a free market capitalist mind these make no sense, as the employee is perceived as an autonomous economic actor who engages in a transaction of pure exchange of work for pay, but to a paternalistic mind these are all part of a social contract.

On the other hand, America seems to be the only country where health insurance is quite regularly provided by the employer. Pension plans paid for by the employer seem to be fairly common too. I think both of these are not taxed like regular salaries too. So American employees seem to expect some fringe benefits from their employers as well.

[CountDeMoney]

So American employees seem to expect some fringe benefits from their employers as well.

That's only because our lives depend on it.