The on-site, catered, or in-house chef-prepared free lunch (and potentially even breakfast, dinner, and endless snacks and drinks) has long been a stable of high-tech companies all over the country, but is most typically centered on the Silicon Valley and San Francisco startup scenes.
Free meals and snacks have become so commonplace (and celebrated), that many companies see the benefit/perk as simply a cost of doing business in order to attract and retain the best talent, (and probably to keep them on-site and working longer hours, and less distracted throughout the day). Heck, most of us are too busy to do much more than have a sandwich and an Diet Dr. Pepper at out desks for lunch anyway - who has time to head out to a restaurant? So making that grab and go and devour lunch in 12 minutes routine much more satisfying by making the food both free and delicious at least gives many tech workers a benefit that the rest of us can only admire from afar.
Well if some Mountain View and San Francisco public officials get their way, the free lunch benefit may finally succumb to the old maxim 'There's no such thing as a free lunch.' Details of what these city leaders have in mind come from a recent piece on Business Insider - San Francisco Bay Area Cities are Cracking Down on Free Food at Facebook and Other Tech Companies:
It's no secret that Facebook employees love their office meals. On Instagram, there are countless photos of free meals — from sushi to tacos to coffee waffles — served at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, California.
But come this fall, when the tech giant moves to a new Mountain View office complex called the Village, that perk will no longer exist.
That's because the city is prohibiting companies from fully subsidizing meals inside the Village, a rule that could spread to other Bay Area cities in the future. Free food is a popular perk at tech companies throughout San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
On Tuesday, San Francisco legislators proposed a similar ban, the San Francisco Examiner reports. If passed, it would adjust zoning laws to bar new construction of on-site workplace cafeterias. (The ban wouldn't be retroactive, however, so on-site food at companies like Google and Twitter would still be available.)
A quick look at the details of the rules in Mountain View and the proposal in San Francisco do show that there are or could be at least some decent-sized loopholes that companies can walk through in order to keep providing employees free lunch. Companies already providing the perk are exempt from the new rules, and the "fully subsidized" language in the rule seems to open up the opportunity for companies to at least heavily subsidize or discount food they bring into the office for employees.
But having said that, let's contemplate for a moment what might happen if these rules/bans actually do stick and new companies or new developments from existing companies discover that the on-site free lunch truly gets eliminated for their workers.
Would there be some kind of a worker revolt? An "We Demand Our Avocado Toast and Cold Brew" march on City Hall? Would some workers actually leave or refuse to join a tech company that actually made employees leave the office and buy their own food? Might a tech company or two simply relocate or decide to build their new facility in a more "free food friendly" location?
Why am I asking so many questions about free lunch? Probably because I have not worked anywhere that offered such an awesome perk.
Because if I did, I'd probably still be working there.
What do you think, should governments be regulating the perks that companies can offer their workers?
Sounds like a bit of an overreach to me. Now you will have to excuse me, I have to go make my own lunch.
Have a great day!
Steve
