In the original RTO email they even pointed the importance of employee spending money in the surrounding restaurants to support the downtime economy as if I should feel personally invested in spending 30$/meal on an overpriced burger for lunch.
Do they have coin/card operated machines then or just no coffee at all?
We also have free tea and hot cocoa.
In most places employees will also bring a Nespresso machine so you can bring your own pods which is somewhat better.
Writing all that I feel like it will come off as extremely entitled. I just want to stress that I personally don't mind much, but having worked for other tech companies, it's definitely at the bottom in terms of "free stuff".
I did it pretty often as it was a nice thing to do and a good way of meeting people who were waiting for the coffee.
So I ordered canned soup, on Amazon, to be shipped to the office mailroom. Then picked up the soups and kept them in the drawer by my desk.
This is crazy, seriously? Apparently no one has written a good enough two-pager arguing that gratis coffee pays for itself with increased productivity
I suspect at the end of this year they will fully remove it, uproar be damned.
Can you bring your own cup? Get the Big Gulp 4 liter thermos every day.
Not that we get great coffee here. It's one of this pod/packet machines. But, it does various teas and some cold drinks as well (fruit/herb infused stuff). So, it works for my second coffee, or a hot cocoa when it's cold outside.
We also get free lunch on T/Th, but that's a new thing since COVID (to entice people back), so I'm not counting on it being around forever. But for now, it is a nice perk and encourages some of that chit-chat the executive class tells us is so critical to making them more money.
It's always amusing when a multi-decade-old, multi-hundred-billion-dollar company says stuff like this. You're not a startup. You never will be.
And if you were, you probably would actually offer perks in your offices that might actually encourage people to be there. Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove multiple times.
I've never seen a company where it seemed more like the leadership of the company actively despises the employees that worked for them. Between stuff like this and the incessant pushing of Amazon Q even though everyone thinks it sucks, it's really apparent that Amazon execs think that having to employ humans as SDE is a defect they're trying to get rid of ASAP.