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Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall
Very few people eat out every day for lunch. Throughout history people have managed to feed themselves through a combination of eating out, bringing lunch, and going to the company cafeteria. Traditionally, company cafeterias have mostly existed in areas with otherwise very limited outside options.
The new trend by these huge companies with endless cash is to keep everyone inside. Google in Chelsea owns a full city block (and then some). I've visited their cafeteria. It's insane. Anything and everything you could possibly imagine. No one leaves that building and the surrounding businesses, which flourished before they arrived, have turned over at a rate that is way out of proportion for the neighborhood. I imagine it's even worse in areas of the country that aren't as dynamic as the west side of NYC.
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When you say "keep everyone inside," what you mean is that they are offering food that's good enough that people don't want to leave. No one, not even Palantir, prevents its employees from leaving. Rather, they are offering food as a perk to make people want to work there, and to work longer. So employees are better off when they get to choose to go to a cafeteria. Restaurants are worse off, because they have new competition. Like bigger companies in our ostensibly free market, some of them would rather go to the government to put their rival out of business than up their game.
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The other problem these massive cafeterias have apparently caused is that they are taking chefs away from businesses, which is also driving them to fail.
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If tech companies are driving up wages for chefs, awesome. In other words, they are competing for talent.
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And it creates a culture of exclusivity. The people who work at these behemoths aren't connected to the community. It breeds animosity, distrust, and separation.
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This makes no sense. Twitter stayed in San Francisco because that's where its workers live. Likewise Google in NYC. The tech giants are competing for talent and so they're locating where it lives. Once upon a time, Google was in Mountain View, and it had more and more trouble persuading people that they wanted to work in the suburbs. (And it started providing food to its workers because MV is suburban and you can't walk to food.)
That's an interesting article. What's it's saying is that Bay Area rents are sky-high, and that it's harder to run an ordinary business because you have to pay ridiculous business rents and you have to pay ridiculous wages so that the people who work for you can afford to have a hovel to live in. The fundamental problem is zoning, with places like Palo Alto (the subject of that article) that want to preserve a suburban character with single-family houses and lawns even though demand is through the roof. No one can afford to live in Palo Alto anymore. So it's no surprise that it's increasing hard to run a restaurant there. I don't think it has anything to do with cafeterias per se.
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I don't see a fix like this as some slippery slope to the end of innovation and progress. It seems like a fairly sensible solution to keep the balance of a neighborhood and something that businesses should have to consider when they basically take over a neighborhood.
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It's not a slippery slope to much of anything, but it's a lousy solution to technological change, much like rent control is a crappy solution to housing shortages. I think I'm hardly an apologist for free markets, but here you having companies competing by offering something that their workers like, and government responding by preventing them from doing it.
