You rise a very important point here. The benefit of free soda or food at work is not that employees can save money; it's that they don't have to think about food. It is abstracted away.

One of the reason those problems appear is probably the wrong mindset of management layer. They think of themselves as the bosses, while they should be thinking they're doing service jobs. Software companies sell software to make money. Software is made by developers (and designers), and sold by sales people. Anything else is support structure. Developer abstraction layer [0] to help translate software to money. But often the structure is inverted, and managers become "shit funnels" instead of "shit umbrellas" [1] - forcing developers to be concerned with things not related to developing. And then productivity declines and good devs leave.

[0] - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio...

[1] - http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/key-to-gmail/