I’m reminded of the debate years ago when I lived in South Dakota, about whether the state should allow vending machines at rest areas on the Interstate.
Yes, there actually was stiff resistance from businesses (especially restaurants) located within a few miles from Interstate exits. They figured that if you could get candy, chips and soda at the rest stops, you wouldn’t take the exit and drive for miles into town for refreshments.
The S.F. proposal is anti-worker; the South Dakota kerfuffle (resolved in favor of vending machines) was essentially anti-tourist/traveler. In both cases the driving factor is/was greed.
Actually, there are some really god Chinese restaurants in Milpitas. If I want to have dim sum, and I don’t feel like driving up the SF or up the peninsula somewhere, Milpitas (or North SJ) is where I go.
Still, assuming that such a boneheaded law was passed, would it achieve the stated desired result?
Would there be increased business to the local restaurants at lunchtime? Or would there be more brown bagging and trips to McDonald’s and Taco Bell?
Many people do not go to sit down restaurants at lunch because they only have an hour. The drive time, the parking, the wait for ordering and preparing, the drive back can make for a very hurried meal. If I go a sit down restaurant, I want to be able to enjoy it.
Mountain View has come a long way. It was pretty much a dump when I first moved to the area in the 70s. Of course, I was living in Palo Alto at the time, so we always looked down on anything south of there. Other than Frankie Johnnie & Luigi’s, Too!
Another point about this is that in-house canteens might not be covering “lunch”. The only place I ever worked with a staff canteen was because we were working shifts. We got half an hour meal break. There weren’t any lunch places nearby, and there certainly wasn’t anywhere you could get a meal at night-time. None of us would have wanted a longer meal break to extend the shift, especially since it wouldn’t have done you any good at buying food anywhere else. Who wants to sit around for an hour doing nothing in the middle of the night? Not everyone works 9 to 5.
I assume computer places have flexible work hours? In which case, having meals available “after hours” may have something to do with companies making “food service” available to employees.
Seems like more of a prediction than a hypothesis. But here’s another: tech companies start sending their shuttle vans out to pick up multiple meals (or catering-sized trays of food); subsequently, DoorDash, Postmates, and Uber Eats will appear before the BoS to demand legislative relief.
You sell bananas, and people are buying oranges instead. Pass a law outlawing oranges, problem solved.
You run a newsstand, and people aren’t buying newspapers and magazines because they are getting that stuff online. Pass a law outlawing online news.
You run an expensive restaurant, and people are passing your establishment up in favor of McDonald’s. Pass a law outlawing cheap restaurants. $2 hamburgers are un-American!
The solutions are so easy when you can pass a law in your favor. And it helps if you can claim that oranges cause cancer, online viewing causes weight gain, and McDonald’s uses spider eggs in their hamburger.
Good point. When I worked at Intel in Santa Clara the cafeteria was pretty much open all night for people on deadlines and workers at the fab in the complex. It was a limited menu but you could get a meal voucher if you had to work really late.
The idiots are going to reduce employment for the food service workers who would be in the new cafeterias. Just what they need.
Maybe tech workers could organize a protest where they all streamed out of their offices at 12 and mobbed the local restaurants behind this. And say they’ll keep doing it until the restaurants withdraw support from the bill. That will drive away the regular patrons and show these greedy guys a lesson. Most of Google could wander over to Castro Street in Mountain View and do the same thing.
Do you have any idea of how many people work in these places? And the work needed to order all this stuff in advance.
Small companies without cafeterias already use delivery services to cater meetings, but it ain’t going to work for the next Twitter.
Company cafeterias are useful for many reasons. For one thing, it’s a perk for the employees you can use to differentiate yourself from other companies. Second, it allows for coordinated meals when you have people in training sessions and other group activities (which are always going on in large companies). Third, it keeps employees in the building in case they are needed, it shortens lunch breaks and it allows employees to take food back to their desks and work over lunch.
Cafeterias also keep employees together and can act as a mingling space, which is a good way to establish cross communications between people on different teams who otherwise never see each other and don’t otherwise often share information. It also creates an atmosphere of inclusivity.
Cafeterias are expensive to build and maintain. For a tech company to decide to manage food inventory, hire chefs, and allocate precious building space to a cafeteria, they have to believe it provides considerable advantages. It would probably cost them less to just give each employee a food benefit consisting of $10 daily voucher. They don’t do that because of the other advantages I mentioned.
Yeah, but we have to weighed that against the social benefit of forcing employees out into the streets to mingle with the locals and patronize local businesses, especially the ones run by people who don’t do the proper market research before opening their businesses. Also, those companies are greedy capitalist enterprises, while the local restaurants are primarily serving the needs of the people. They’re practically charitable organizations! We’re all stakeholders in the viability of these artisanal ventures.
Maybe, but I don’t know if there’s somebody here who can propose it, what would work is something similar to the model that’s used in many Western European countries (tech companies normally don’t think “European” is a defect, do they?). People get an amount they can use for food, either in the form of a prepaid card which is valid for food only, or of individual tickets again valid for food only. The tickets are the original form, so the benefit is called “food tickets” and they are linked to different companies such as these guys. Any establishment which has a sign with the food-tickets-company logo will honor them.
It combines providing the benefit with that benefit still being valid when someone says “it’s my birthday and I REFUSE to eat a fucking sandwhich at my bloody desk! I’m going out damnit! Anybody else wants to come you’ll be welcome, but you must decide NOW.”
Part of the problem with that, at least in the Silicon Valley, is getting out of the campus to go *use *the tickets. A lot of tech campuses are huge (the spouse works at the Apple Spaceship, for example) and parking and traffic can be problematic, especially when everybody is trying to get in or out at roughly the same time. I don’t know about San Francisco, but at Apple, Google, Facebook, etc., it’s not simply an easy matter of walking a block to a restaurant. First you have to get off campus, and then you have to drive to where the restaurants are.
Apple doesn’t provide free lunches. I’ve been to a couple of their cafeterias (not the Spaceship one yet–hopefully soon) and they’re quite nice, with a selection of different cuisines. If I worked there, I wouldn’t leave for lunch either–but I don’t think it’s the government’s business to be telling people where they have to eat.
