Intel resumes free coffee and tea for its employees — $100-million-per-year program partly reinstated to boost employee morale
Fresh fruits remain out of reach in the breakroom, though.
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Coffee will continue until morale improves.
Employers figured out years ago that caffeine has excellent ROI for productivity. (Amphetamines are probably a close second, but we won't talk about that right now.)
For Intel to cut basic morale boosters was just pure silliness.
Counterpoint: 100 million for coffee in a year sounds astronomical, even for the 120k employees intel has. Like, what are they paying for, doordash starbucks?
The headline is bullshit. The 100 million is for all food/drink services, not just coffee.
And an air shuttle for the executives...
Actually the air shuttle service was available to all employees assuming 1) They had an existing route for your source/destination 2) It was a valid business reason they would be paying travel expenses for anyways.
Edit: But your implied point that it probably cost a lot of money is true.
$2.5 a day per employee? not too bad I feel
That’s $3.33 per employee per work day, assuming 50 5-day weeks per year. Seems a bit high to me, but not exorbitant. If the figure included things that they’re not reinstating (like free fruit) then that would make sense.
You can get over 500g of ground coffee for that price. It absolutely is exorbitant
That does not include the machines that make it on demand which you kinda need for an office that size nor servicing them which you ABSOLUTELY need.
It's still overpriced like all service contracts are....but my office would riot if we replaced the machines with traditional brewers. Nobody wants to make (or wait for) coffee at the office. And nobody wants to drink the nasty burnt liquid when it's been sitting there all day
500 grams of what, though? Folgers?
The current average price per pound (454 grams) of ground coffee beans in the US was double that just a couple months ago, so spending $3.00 per pound would necessitate getting cheaper than average - and therefore, likely lower quality than average, or at least lower perceived quality than average - beans.
The sorts of beans that companies tend to stock (IME) that are perceived as higher quality aren’t the same brands that I tend to buy (generally from local roasters), but they’re comparably priced. For a 5 pound (2267 grams) bag of one of their blends (which are roughly half the price of their higher end beans), it’s similar to what you’d pay for 5 pounds of Starbucks beans - about $50-$60.
Often when a company says “free coffee,” they don’t mean “free batch-brewed drip coffee,” but rather, free espresso beverages, potentially in a machine (located in the break room) that automates the whole process. I assume that’s what Intel is doing.
At $10 per pound (16 ounces) and roughly 1 ounce (28 grams) of beans per two ounce pour of espresso, that means that if each person on average drinks two per day, then that’s $1.25 for coffee per person per day.
However, logistics costs (delivering coffee to all the company’s break rooms) and operational costs (the cost of the automatic machine and repairs, at minimum; or the cost of baristas, or adding the responsibility to someone’s existing job (and thus needing more people or more hours) if just batch brewing) have to be added on top of that. Then add in the cost of milk, milk alternatives, sweeteners, cups, lids, stir sticks, etc..
Obviously if they just had free coffee grounds and let people handle the actual brewing of coffee in the break room, it would be much cheaper. But if the goal is to improve morale, having higher quality coffee that people don’t have to make themselves is going to do that better.
For $100M/yr why not start your own coffee subsidiary?
and then we'll yank that shit again so our board can be paid more money that they don't need, and can never spend!