The campus was really too big to leave for lunch unless you arrived at some stupid early hour to park underground below your office. It's a 10-15 minute walk to the south parking garage and then at least a 10 minute drive to the closest places to eat and none of those are cheaper than the cafe.
So unless you're bringing food from home you can pretty easily hit $20 for lunch per day. I doubt Cafe Macs is running a huge profit but the cost for employees is non-trivial.
I am used to pay at least 10 euros, for food + drink, unless I go to one of those special lunch time deals or street food places.
And since I am Portuguese, evenings is also a proper meal, so make it twice for the days I happen to dine outside as well.
In fact to this day I never gotten into the whole Abendbrot stuff, even though I have lived half of my life in German speaking countries.
Just explaining where I am coming from, not attacking anyone.
https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-free-food-google-cafe...
You'll be able to make it healthier though, and tune it exactly to what you like.
When you get older, you start to understand food, and you are willing to pay more for it, but now you have to count calories.
Can I survive on $10 a day? I did it on $3 a DAY when my parents were on food stamps, but I am not that crazy about going back to the "franks, rice, and ketchup" menu.
Even if you value your labor/time to cook to be worth of zero dollars, when I was at Google my cafe had fresh seafood (a rotation of different types of fish, scallops, shrimps, mussel, crab, etc) and good quality regular meat dish (I particularly liked the skirt steak with guacamole), great vegan/vegetarian options, in-house made desserts including fresh made chocolate truffles every day prepared by the chef.
And that's just lunch, at one cafe, not including breakfast and dinner and options at the other 3 dozens cafes on campus.
If you can recreate all of that for two people with a $60/week budget, then kudos to you. I know I can't.
You then mention chocolate truffles. Personally if I had my employer providing ridiculous good food for free, I’ll likely live less healthy because I will eat those nice unhealthy things every day.
If I am prepping my own food I have complete control over what I buy and can choose _not_ to buy unhealthy things.
Also in my experience a reason why food prepared by a chef tastes so good: more fat used.
I assume that Google and Facebook canteens (well that’s what they are) are better than the ones offered by companies here in Germany, but I think I would still gain weight.
That probably depends on your cultural background.
Whenever I was in the US and worked for large tech companies I found the food too fat, too sweet, (interestingly same things like Kellogs are totally different in the US than in Europe), too much artifical flavor, too much cheese, too much toppings, large unhealthy portions.
The water and Cola tasted like Chlorine and were undrinkable - I guess you don't taste it when you grow up with that taste.
I had good food here an there, especially great - and expensive - steaks in NYC and once the best fish tacos in the world on a beach in San Diego, but overall the food wasn't to my liking. I was dissapointed by the food in SF, I had very high hopes from hearing all the good things but it was just average.
Food which I did like more than the food for "those two people" in general was the food in the South of France, in Sardinia, Corsica and Rome, desserts of the Middle East, in Japan and Vietnam - also Copenhagen is so underrated concerning food.
The food for "those two people" tastes natural, has no artifical flavorings and is healthy.
So it probably depends on your cultural background, as I've said.
For the last five years we're cooking most of our meals at home, maybe go out or order food once or twice a month. The food we cook isn't as exotic, nicely looking or sophisticated as the food served at Google, but it is tasty, fresh, healthy and the groceries are pretty cheap. And despite being older, my blood results are better now than when I was leaving Google.
I understand what you're saying, but still cringed at that statement. Eating well and, by extension, cooking is hardly something I would value at $0/hour and I find it mildly insulting that someone would devalue the time I dedicate to preparing meals.
If you don't like cooking and would rather dedicate some of your income to having someone else do it for you, please frame it in that way. It recognizes it is your own decision and comes off as less judgmental of others.
I can definitely relate to him because I hate spending time cooking, I don't like the prep, I don't like the drudge work, and I don't like to have to clean up afterwards. I have a finite lifespan and I don't wanna waste any of it on things that I fundamentally do not enjoy, particularly if it's entirely avoidable.
But the best part of the day is the very first fresh ground coffee with real sugar and real cream in the morning. You just can't beat it.
Also fasting is better for you than eating all the time.
At wet markets in China/HK/TW/SE Asia, you might be able to eat for a month on 60 USD.
Buying raw ingredients and cooking them yourself is cheaper in terms of explicit dollar costs, but if you don't enjoy cooking then you also need to assign some monetary value for having to do something that you don't like.
I think I would enjoy taking a break and cooking so free food is probably not worth $60 to me personally. It's not crazy to think that my employer gets a benefit of more than $60 through increased productivity by providing me with free food though.
Once I committed to WFH life, it became a logical next step to double down on the freedom aspects and start my own consulting firm.
That meant I needed long term thinking. I learned to cook more often and turned my entire front yard into a garden.
Overall I would say WFH has been net healthier on my mind and wallet.
It will last years though, do you NEED to cook only one thing with it?
If you cook frequently enough then it's just not an issue; there's always something with not much good life left, sure, but that's what you use next.
If course if you don't cook it's not a problem either, so it's probably unfortunately the cause of some reluctance. Maybe kits help that.
However, if 1) I cook all my food, and 2) try to have a healthy diet I spend easily the equivalent of 30USD/day. Going to a restaurant sets you back around the same amount per meal.
So, assuming I work 200 days/year going to the office and get free food would save me 6k USD/year (also assuming I cook 100% off my meals). That kind of money would pay for holidays or other stuff.
Finally, my back of the envelope math didn't include the time I spend cooking and all the "premium" stuff I get at the office like fancy drinks and snacks, which I usually don't buy when WFH.
I really think a lot of this debate is colored by Americans thinking of the American commute.
Whenever a pissing contest about grocery prices happens (and don't kid yourself, if a number has been mentioned it's not a question of when but rather an indication that the pissing has begun) you must quote a lower number than the previous person. It doesn't need to be true, it doesn't need to include critical qualifying information like location and tradeoffs, it doesn't even need to be particularly likely -- but it must be lower. So it is written. Here, I'll demonstrate:
I only spend $250 per month on groceries and I cannot imagine the disgusting excess that could possibly lead anyone to waste a single cent more!
Is the cooked-for-you food free?
Anything but free. Meal plan requirements vary.
Where I lived undergrad, we had a kitchen for a suite of rooms although I ate out a fair bit. (Many dorms did not have cooking facilities though.) Both places I went for grad school (which were actually both Ivy League) had no cooking facilities of any type.
It's not free, you are required to pay for a meal plan when you are on campus dormitory housing.
In fact I'd guess it's probably a requirement here - I don't think student halls are treated any differently to any private rented accommodation, it's probably a requirement that there be access to a (possibly shared) kitchen.
It's also quite (and increasingly) common that you're only in halls (or at least only guaranteed a place) in first year, thereafter in private rented accommodation of course you'd expect a kitchen; whereas I gather in the US the vast majority are campus universities, and provide on-campus accomodation throughout all years.
Did the "The Young Ones" not get picked up in the US
I eat well and spend maybe $400 a month on groceries and food.
I’ve heard that Google recruiters attempt to con potential employees into some ridiculous assessment of the “free” food as a compensation benefit with numbers like those that you posited above. I can’t imagine valuing daily meals that highly.