When I worked for a major university athletics department, we had a long list of truly excellent perks:
Two season tickets to all home football games
Two season tickets to all home basketball games
Use of all university athletic facilities - swimming pool, tennis courts, auxilliary gyms, etc.
Free hockey, basketball, etc. camp in the summer for my kids
One free class - undergrad or grad - per semester for each employee
And best of all, free tuition for all my kids at the university, and if they couldn’t qualify for admission (admission standards were stringent and competitive), they would pay for $2,000/year in tuition at any other university.
I was one of the last Viet Nam era draftees, and was stationed in Alaska. Originally I was an MP, a job for which (to put it mildly) I was not well suited. After an infraction I was assigned to what was essentially a hotel, where incoming servicemen and their families would be given temporary housing until regular housing was available. To simulate a hotel, us desk clerks wore civilian clothes and were given private rooms in the bachelor officer’s quarters- separate buildings. As we worked odd hours, we were paid extra food allowance and had fridges in our rooms. We even got overtime pay. My old MP buddies couldn’t believe it.
My dad was a relatively large player in GM before he retired and part of his job was to buy and sell brand-new cars.
He would have a car for 6 months, then we’d have it for a year and then sell it. Each new car overlapped the old one.
So growing up I got to ride in/drive a whole host of cool cars. Camaros, Firebirds, Vette’s, Caddys, a bunch. We would have a family meeting every 9 months and say “So, what car do we want now?”
Still happening. My daughter works for a cheapo airline, which gives free fares for it and fares of $10 or $20 on Southwest. Plus coach fares for any Star Alliance airline for 10% of the regular fare, and sometimes business class. And we as her parents get it too.
Plus at her old job the airlines donated nice travel packages for the Christmas party. She won airfare hotel in Thailand. Not a bad raffle prize.
When I worked for AT&T after the divestiture and before the trivestiture we got the first $67 of long distance free. (I think so that MCI couldn’t do an ad with AT&T people using them.) And we got a pair of safety glasses free a year when I officially worked for Western Electric - though I never worked in a factory.
Some perks I have enjoyed over the years include:
-reserved parking space
-extensive travel, often staying in 5 star hotels
-sports events across the country, usually in a suite
-performance based bonuses
-high end meals
-low interest, no fee loans
and probably others I’ve forgotten or didn’t take advantage of.
I still have a pair of fancy wingtip shoes in cordovan with steel toes, from the days back when they issued safety gear to anyone who might possibly enter a laboratory. I have worn them to church on many occasions—no one knows their secret.
When my brother first moved into the big leagues of his company, he was offered use of their private box at xxxx Arena. Nobody else had heard of this Dire Straits band. He jumped at the opportunity. On Monday, his boss mentioned that his party set a record for liquor consumed at an event. He said it with a big smile, so it was cool.
My gf works in advertising. Each year they get a certain amount per years employed toward "personal enrichment "; things like classes, gym memberships, etc. She was in the market for her own kayak. The dealer wrote the sale up as $1200 of kayak lessons and a free boat, rather than the usual $1200 kayak with a free lesson.
Eons ago I owned a Laundromat. From experience I can tell you that it isn’t much more fun even if all the cash actually belongs to you, rather than Faceless Megacorp who you work for. It’s all just a big pile of stinky wrinkly filthy paper.
And in our case it was mostly 1s and a few percent of 5s. So even a huge pile of it wasn’t much value. Now had they all been Benjamins I *might *have stayed excited for longer.
Don’t know how I forgot this. My wife used to review toys and syndicated the reviews to parenting magazines. She got to go to Toy Fair in NY, which is amazing, but even better she got lots of free stuff, including boxes with every toy various makers were introducing that year. Including Tickle Me Elmo when it got introduced and was impossible to get. It was tempting, but we gave it to our kid instead of selling it.
It got so our kids, when they wanted a toy, asked her if she could review it.
It ended when the editors of the local magazines figured out that they could get free toys if they wrote the reviews themselves.
My current job offers great benefits - 5 weeks of vacation plus holidays + 150% match on 401K contributions (the biggest long-term benefit of all) + profit sharing + free health insurance. It is a consulting company whose parent company is French so that may have something to do with it but I am still not quite sure why they are so generous. It adds up extremely quickly if you can keep your contract for the long-term.
My permanent client has their own benefits that they give me as well. It is an industrial environment so I get a really nice pair of steel-toed shoes of my choice once a year. When I travel for them, I book my own accommodations because I an not an official employee and they just give me whatever I put on my corporate credit card including my own rental car, hotel room and entertainment expenses (real employees have to share).
Back in the early 90’s I worked for Holiday Inn. Employees got ridiculous discounts for any Holiday Inn, or affiliated properties. Never took advantage of it myself (I wasn’t there that long), but I remember some co-workers stayed at the Crowne Plaza in New York for $25/night.
Microsoft has some pretty good benefits such as:
[ul]
[li]Free shuttle transportation between it’s buildings on it’s large campus[/li][li]Free commuter busses and shuttles from various places around town to encourage carpooling (this also includes free wi-fi) [/li][li]discounts on hardware and software[/li][li]a very good health plan[/li][li]free to use sports fields with professional turf[/li][li]a “mall” of sorts at the main campus that has a lot of local food vendors, a spa, shops, a shipping store, banks, and cell phone shops[/li][li]random live music performances by smaller artists[/li][li]tuition reimbursement[/li][li]large cafeterias in every few buildings with local restaurants manning some of the locations.[/li][/ul]Free drinks all over campus (soda, carbonated waters, tea, coffee, milk, juices)
I was going to say “a TV in my office” which sounds like “I got a rock” compared to some of these perks.
Although back when I worked for newspapers I reviewed books, plays and performances, so free tickets and books for the price of getting to write my opinion was a worthwhile trade-off. Lately though my perks have been mostly limited to “get to meet famous people every once in a while.”
