Elon Musk said that Twitter spent $13 million (around ₹104 crore) per year on food services at its San Francisco headquarters. He said this while dismissing Twitter's former Vice President of Work Transformation Tracy Hawkins' claim that the company spent $20-$25 a day per person.
This is really shocking and also triggers the discussion whether such overhead cost is really required.
There has been a phenomenon of bringing in packed food to offices from homes. When such a cooking facility is not available at home, employees rely on nearby food joints. They may come back late to the office after lunch citing excuses like traffic jams, vehicle break down, sudden rainfall etc. To put a check to this, the employers started serving food to their employees, though an overhead cost. But what is happening eventually?
The employees are spending hours while having food and not returning to their seats in time. Technically they are within the office premises but the optimum utilization of resources is failing on the administration side. The impact is in fact bigger on the biggest companies like Twitter or Google.
An estimate says that Google's Ginormous Free Food Budget: $7,530 Per Googler, $72 Million a Year.
When recession hits the world, the companies like these first reduce the head counts and make many become unemployed instead of giving away the free food concept to save millions. Moreover, big companies that survive on public companies tend to hire employees many times more than that of actual requirements. This gross wastage of public money is exposed only when the guys like Elon Musk own big companies like Twitter.
Now everything will be in order and the employees won't have the luxury of enjoying free benefits and a cozy lifestyle under the private single manned financial leadership.
