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A Look at Silicon Valley Cafeterias

Posted by timothy on from the google's-helps-you-find-the-food dept.

boycottthecaf writes "The San Jose Mercury News has a story on the cafeterias of Silicon Valley companies, and how they are used to keep workers on site during lunch. Google, of course, has the cafeteria everyone envies."

15 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. The Cafeterias... by 10101001011 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...are an excellent indicator, in my experience, of the success of a company. For instance, I used to work at Nortel (Nortel.ca), one of Canada's premier hihg-tech companies during the bubble.

    During the bubble, the cafeteria was practically giving away food. Actually, they were doing precisely that -- many days during the week your lunch would be paid for. One could also go down at any time and pick up soda fountain drinks for free. This, like so many things (like the free massage parlor) were not to last...

    As Nortel's profits declined, so did the number of different food stalls in the cafeteria. Similarly, I couldn't even go down to pick up a glass of soda water -- the company stopped giving it away. In fact, the ice water cooler was likewise turned off. The breakrooms were stripped of their free coffee and tea (and hot chocolate, *sigh*). And their water coolers were removed. And then the styrofoam cups (and their subsequent paper brethern faced a similar fate). Then they got rid of the plates and plastic forks and spoons. Finally, when the free sugar sachets left, so did I.

    I guess I can finally say I am what I ate -- unemployed.

    1. Re:The Cafeterias... by HMarieY · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Not sure why the above was marked Troll. I find what was said very insightful. In fact we saw the same thing happen at the company where my husband works, though it is still around having survived the dot.com bubble. I suspect that many /.ers have observed similar trends.

      During the bubble, where my husband works, money was thrown around quite a bit and though they didn't have a cafeteria often the bosses would take the employees (there were two bosses and six employees) out to the most exclusive restaraunts in the area, more than once inviting employee families including about ten children. Other times they would order in take-out, also from high end places. As the dot.com bubble popped and the company stock dropped lunch became the secretary picking up a buy-your-own lunch at the local Burger King and my husband started brown bagging it.

      If these companies have the money to spend on food and a fancy cafeteria then they probably are doing pretty well, though sometimes it is just a front and the spending is out of line.

  2. What they forget to mention.... by mikael · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Many of these companies have more than 20+ building distributed across the Bay Area. It's only the main campus which has the large cafeteria and maybe other luxuries like a fitness centre (SGI's main building was across the road from the cinema multiplex).

    If you're not working at the main building, then you end up with at least a 20 minute freeway drive to the nearest restaurant. For anywhere upmarket, you need to book at least a day in advance, as there are usually queues outside by lunchtime (Palo Alto). If you're lucky there might be a Mexican restaurant with outside tables, or a Chinese takeaway, but all the tables are quickly taken. And the specials would be snapped up within quarter of an hour of cooking.

    --
    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  3. lunch in the financial district by maaw · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My friends that work in the financial district in san francisco have a pretty nice perk at their office. It is a huge hassle to go out for lunch there, so everyday around 10:30 someone goes around and takes orders for lunch, comes back around noonish with everyones food, the company pays for it and there are no real restrictions on whats ordered. They do a different restraunt/take out place everyday so it doesnt get boring. My buddy went from eating rice with mini hotdogs to seared ahi salads.

  4. State of PA Government food by astrojetsonjr · · Score: 4, Interesting
    You don't need to go to the left coast to eat, you can just VisitPA (tm) in Harrisburg and eat in their cafeterias. Breakfast is the best with almost any dish you can think of. But the government is no slouch when it comes to lunch. Pork chops, pasta lots of different ways, giant salad bars.

    Of course since your government servants are underpaid, the cafeteria get financial support, your tax dollars in action!

  5. Re:Silicon Valley by bat'ka+makhno · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It sounds like you're being paid by the hour. More power to you.

    For the majority of IT workers who aren't, the hourly wage effectively diminishes the longer they work. From that point of view, one might indeed wonder whether free meals at the cafeteria truly compensate for an extended workday.

    As for the slavery comment, it might be a bit hyperbolic, but it does capture the essence of a worker's relationship to the company. Leaving isn't really an option when you have a family to support or when the local economy is tanking. It's not a particularly flexible situation, unless you were born rich or have exceptional life circumstances, such as being in your twenties.

  6. Re:They pay? by Momoru · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sure it's easy to say something like that when your Google fresh off an IPO and loaded with more cash then you know what to do with, but say your Sun Microsystems or even Yahoo, you've been offering free lunch to your employees to have productivity gains and now your quarterly profits have fallen....management and investors look at the $500,000 a month you spend on your cafeteria, so its either axe that benefit or lay some people off. Either way, now as an employee I feel ripped off that I can no longer get free lunch. So morale and productivity plummet to rediculously low levels. It's also been disputed whether these offer real productivity gains. I think read that Mark Jen (the google blogger who was fired) or someone else said that most people at google just stay for the free lunch and dinner and head home.

  7. Re:Article text. by Rodness · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When I used to work at Sun Microsystems (about 5 years ago when the Santa Clara campus was very new) the food was excellent and there were routinely about 2 dozen different options for lunch each day. The cost was also so low I paid less than $5, even on an indulgent day.

    Personally I found it nice to not have to leave work for a good lunch, and the time that we didn't spend driving around in that traffic meant that I could leave earlier in the day.

    Despite what slave labor critics may claim, I never found it to be anything but a major perk of working there.

  8. Out For Lunch == More Productive Employee by $criptah · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The office that my company rents is located in a nice building with a nice cafeteria that aims to please everybody from earth loving hippies to guys that eat meatballs for dessert. However, whenever I have a chance I either bring my own lunch and eat it at my desk OR go somewhere far away from the office.

    I have one hour for lunch. My office is the LAST fucking place on earth where I would want to spend it. Okay, I can think of worse places, but you get the point. I work with a number of certain people every day. I meet the same faces and talk about the same old things. Why not get out? I tend to overpay for my lunch because I like a nice Japanese restaurant two blocks away from my office. So what? I get to relax and forget about the job. Hell, I'd argue that having lunch away from the office makes me more productive because I come back with a fresh state of mind.

  9. free lunch guilt by denidoom · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't know about anyone else but I'm so damaged from the bust if I ever bite into a free bagel I think "How much did this bagel cost? Shouldn't we be lean and mean? Why are they spending money on this crap?" It's like a bad flashback would happen and I would remember at my former company the CEO standing in front of us saying all of these positive things about profitability and being numero uno while we ate our free food. We had free free sodas as well. There were even free tampons in the ladies bathroom. When it all started to end all of a sudden there was no more free lunch day, no more free sodas, or feminine products. It's laughable, but I think any company that spends such an amount on a perk seems foolish and this again is my damaged self feeling this after so long you would think I could once again bite a free bagel and not feel the pinch of foreboding. But I do.

    --
    Lane Myer: I have great fear of tools. I once made a birdhouse in woodshop and the fair housing committee condemned it.
    1. Re:free lunch guilt by bleckywelcky · · Score: 2, Interesting

      But how much does it really cost? If you are buying soda on a bulk basis for your employees, you can get it pretty cheap. Let's say you have 1000 employees, and you have enough for everyone to get 3 sodas a day (you really shouldn't drink that much anyhow). That's 3000 sodas a day, at probably $0.20 per soda (or less) in bulk (I'm thinking a 12 ounce can). That's $600 per day, $3000 per week, $150 000 per year. Might seem like a lot right now, but considering that the company spends at least $100k per year on each employee, probably more ($60k average salary, another $40k on infrastructure and benefits) ... it's not that much. That's $100 000 000 spent on employees. The $150k is only 0.15% of their total employee expenses.

      And I am sure you could cut the soda costs to 1/10th of that by dropping the individual serving cans in favor of bulk syrup, gas, and a dispensing machine.

      In the end, it's just managers looking to cut whatever they possibly can. They don't look at the significance of the cuts. Instead of spending 2 weeks deciding to cut the soda, and formulating a plan for cutting the soda, only to save the company 0.15%, why not spend those two weeks on improving company/department efficiency or cutting out redundant design steps, etc.

    2. Re:free lunch guilt by drsquare · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Don't look at it in terms on total expense, look at it in terms of profit. Say for instance your margins are pretty thin, and your annual profits are $300,000. That $150,000 a year is 50% of your profits. Also I'm sure that average wages are not 60k, probably more like 20k. Also that's just the soda. Include the food, say 250 meals a year per employee, or 250,000 meals a year. If each meal costs you $5, that's $1.25 MILLION a year. Cutting out the meals gives you over a million dollars in raw profit.

      If I became CEO of a corporation which gave free meals which cost a lot, the first thing I'd do is cut the meals, that's instant profit right there, what a way to start your job! If employees aren't expecting free meals, they won't complain if they don't get them.

      They don't look at the significance of the cuts.

      Significance? It's fucking fizzy drinks. At my workplace there's a fizzy drinks machine that's 45p a tin, I don't think it would provide much benefit to give tins away for free, people would probably just abuse it and drink until their teeth had rotten and they'd put on 20lbs of weight.

      Instead of spending 2 weeks deciding to cut the soda, and formulating a plan for cutting the soda, only to save the company 0.15%, why not spend those two weeks on improving company/department efficiency or cutting out redundant design steps, etc.

      Why not improve the efficiency, cut out redundant design steps, AND cut the soda? It doesn't take 2 weeks of solid work to say 'right no more free soda', it's take a single fucking memo.

  10. Re:They pay? by fm6 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Wouldn't you supply your employees with free food?
    Depends on the employees. If you mostly employee geeks who work on salary and whose lives begin and end with technology, then yeah, you can certainly squeeze some extra work out of them by keeping them onsite with free meals and other such services. But I have to wonder how healthy this work-is-life philosophy is in the long run.

    Incidentally, one way Google keeps its people onsite is by providing a free laundramat. I find the idea of my co-workers (not to mention the occasional visiting celebrity) seeing my literal dirty laundry deeply disturbing.

  11. Re:They pay? by shufler · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But I have to wonder how healthy this work-is-life philosophy is in the long run.

    If you own your own business, chances are work is your life, and better still -- you're working in a field you enjoy. There's no reason not to love working if the work you do is something you actually enjoy doing.

    I think free meals (and quality, proper nutritious meals at that) are a very excellent idea. I work from home, so I can prepare good meals any hour of the day I want. When I worked for other people, this was out of the question, not to mention logistically difficult to do (ever tried cooking a steak in a microwave?).

    Another benefit of having a cafeteria with good food -- you don't spend as long driving around at lunch looking for somewhere to eat. You can take a shorter lunch, and then leave earlier (provided your bosses allow this).

    People have pointed out that when the time comes, things like free food would be the first item to be cut from the budget, but that's stupid. Remember, food is what fuels us. Without food, we die. With poor nutrition, we don't perform to the best of our abilities. It's in a company's best interest to make sure their employees have good health. Obviously management isn't the employee's mother -- they can't force someone to eat what they say, but it seems very reasonable for them to provide the potential for their employees to be fed good food.

  12. wth is wrong with muffins? by IndependentVik · · Score: 2, Interesting

    . . . their strategy was to offer muffins in the morning. Since 7/8 of the staff was Indian, that went over like cheeseburgers in a sacred temple.

    wtf? What does being Indian having to do w/ liking muffins or not? Unless we're talking about some new, wacky veal muffins I've never heard about.
    (note: I'm of Indian descent--the "Vik" in my nick is short for "Vikram")

    --
    I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.