One of the places I worked, I remember talking with the admin. She was responsible for ordering food to keep the kitchen stocked. It was a few coffee machines, and a rack full of snacks. No beer, no drinks. IIRC she said it cost something on the order of $50-75k/year, and this was for an office of maybe 150 people or so.

I guess that amount of money is small compared to some engineers' salaries but I was surprised by how expensive it was for coffee & snacks.

$50k/year per 150 people is 1$/day per person. How is that expensive?

$50k/year looks like a lot, but imagine you lose an equivalent of just one person out of 150 for not having it - e.g. in people leaving and not being immediately replaced, training costs, time costs of going into a corner coffee-shop to get some joe and returning 1.5 hours later, costs of not being able to hire top people because they like to be provided coffee, etc., etc. You'll see very quickly how it is not a wasted money at all.

150 people is a lot. Their payroll and benefits probably cost $10 - $15 million per year.

The moment coffee goes I go. So you could say it's more expensive not to pay for it.

Servers? I don't know how many total members there are but they are running 140k groups? That doesn't sound like you need a to pay Amazon millions of dollars to run it.

Can this meme die already? Durr Google is just a static webpage with a textfield. Why do they need X engineers lmao

You're not seeing a slight difference between a search engine indexing the whole web and a calendar with signups and comments? Yes, I know they do a bit more than that, but let's keep it in perspective.

What at meetup requires hundreds or thousands of servers?

It's a bit more than just a calendar. Thousands maybe not, but hundreds - I wouldn't be surprised, if you count also dev/staging/QA ones especially.

The point isn't the expenses, as much as those kind of luxuries say a lot about a company's fiscal values.

It's nice to realize I am living in luxury by just having a tolerable chair that doesn't give me a permanent injury and some beer in the fridge.

A sibling comment explained it better than I did, but it's not the comfortable chair or the beer or the lunches or the foosball table. It's the slippery slope of unchecked spending. Plus while an Aeron is a great chair, you can find a lot of great chairs for at least half the price (including used Aerons)

Why you assume it's necessarily unchecked? What you are complaining about are very basic things. Nobody is talking about giving employees daily foot massages, hiring celebrity chefs from Michelin-starred restaurants and having an olympic pool in the middle of the office. Such things could happen, but that's not what we're talking about here. A comfy chair and a fridge with some beers is pretty basic - and not really that expensive. Sure, everything should be in moderation - but what is described it perfectly moderate picture and not some excess luxury. If anything, if I see the company is starting to try to save money on chairs and buy cheap-and-crappy ones, I'd probably look for another job, because there's trimming fat and there's cutting the bone, and proper office setup is definitely the bone.

These benefits are available to all employees at all levels though. Why are people so set on trying to eliminate one of the few benefits even the interns can get to enjoy?

Why on earth would I ever want to work at a company that doesn't value my posture, reduced risk of RSI or the possible ideas/innovation that can come from me chatting/bonding with my coworkers over a beer.

It's a drop in the bucket compared to executive ubers, flights and hotels.