So over 20,000 employees would leave the Googleplex every day at noon to get lunch?
This just means the next massive campus complex will not open in Mountain View. Big profitable companies and their hordes of tax paying employees will go elsewhere, and definitely will not be supporting MTV's local businesses.
Welcome to the wonderful world of unintended consequences!
As a Mountain View resident who has to drive on Shoreline, please no! This would be disastrous. It's already a mess at 9 a.m. every day thanks to Google. I have to leave to get to work super early just to get on the freeway before the Google traffic makes me drive a 1 mile stretch in 1/2 hour.
Presumbly there would be restaurants in Shoreline in this scenario, and Google employees would walk to the restaurant to spend their money, just like in downtowns across the world. Or they'd bring lunch from home.
The Googleplex has over 20,000 employees, and food trucks are among the least efficient ways to feed them. You'd have huge convoys of food trucks entering and leaving the Googleplex for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Access control is vital in a location like a tech company's headquarters. With hundreds of random food trucks coming and going every day, such control will become impossible.
Finally, food trucks are notorious for cutting corners when it comes to food quality, especially any health concerns. I would now want myself or my employees eating from food trucks all day, every day.
The Village at San Antonio is not North Bayshore. This wouldn't work at Google's current campus because there are literally not enough restaurants to feed everyone - there were 4 when I worked there (Sports Page + the Sunnybowl/Falafel/Sushi complex), and since then Sports Page has closed and there are apparently a few new ones by the Computer History Museum. Perhaps the new zoning plans for North Bayshore include more, but it'll be years before that's done.
But when The Village was zoned, it was explicitly done with street-level retail for a wide variety of restaurants. There are over a dozen restaurants within a 5-minute walk of Facebook's offices, plus a Walmart, Safeway, Whole Foods, and produce market, all of which have ready-to-eat meals.
Something that's left out of a lot of the news coverage of this: it's not a law but a development condition attached to the particular property that Facebook is occupying. When a real-estate developer wants to develop a piece of property, there's a complex negotiation with the local municipality (or county, if it's in unincorporated land) that includes things like contracting for water/sewer/garbage services, how to ensure there's adequate police & fire coverage, how the town will build new roads to handle traffic generated from the property, what's the impact on schools & community services, and what types of dwellings & permitted uses are available for the property (you can't build a skyscraper in the path of SJC airport, for example, nor can you build a chip fab on residential land). Written into that contract is the cafeteria clause under discussion here. While I have some doubts about whether this is a good thing (I've got another comment here where I expressed mixed feelings), it's a contract and not a law, and obviously Facebook has felt that the restriction is not too onerous for the building to be worth occupying.
...Facebook has felt that the restriction is not too onerous for the building to be worth occupying.
Perhaps originally they thought they could inspire enough of a public outcry like that seen in this thread to get the rules relaxed eventually... with their recent PR troubles that probably won't happen.
I'd bet that it's honestly not that important to them. They'll probably forego the cafeteria and just let their highly-paid employees buy lunch the way 99% of the population does. It won't be a popular building to work at, but if you work at Facebook, are you really gonna quit because you work at an office without a cafe? You've probably got bigger things on your mind, like the 20% drop in the stock price that happened today.
It does make more sense for a development like the Village, but I'm still concerned about the encroaching and escalating intrusion of local lawmakers in a benefit employers wish to provide their employees.
I skip breakfast, because the commute is so terrible that by the time I get to the office, it is too late, and I am unwilling to wake up any earlier in the morning for it. (Though, if I really did force myself to have breakfast, I would be waking up for it, not eating out.)
As for lunch, my company only provides it once per week. On the one day we do provide it, it is catered, and thus requires local labor. On the other days, I go out to get it. My favorite sandwich shop just closed; my coworker's favorite Korean place closed with them. If I had to guess, I would suspect they simply couldn't sustain themselves with the rents as they are. Their prices were decent. Other nearby eateries with more of a, for want of a better word, hipster feel to them charge significantly more for less food; I avoid eating there because over the course of the entire year, it represents a non-trivial amount of money. But if it comes to it that they're the only ones that can survive, I'll probably just abandon eating out altogether.
As it is, I'm making plans to abandon SV altogether primarily due to the issues mentioned by your parent: the ever declining quality of life in the Bay Area. Will that be a boon to the local market?
This is the real point. The idea that somehow the catering business serving startups or the kitchen workers in cafes are somehow less worthy of support than owners of restaurants
To be fair, there are a lot of efficiency gains and economies of scale involved.
Google pays a lot less to provide an employee with a nutritious, healthy meal than the same employee would be paying for a less healthy meal in your typical local restaurant.
So this law will create more local jobs in the short term... except the next Techplex will not be built in MTV, which will lose it far more local jobs than it gained.
No, this is not the real point. Employment isn't an upside, that's the broken window fallacy.
Employees should be allowed to bring food from home to eat at their desks if they want, and that is obviously terrible for jobs in local cafes and restaurants.
Restaurants do have some added benefits over just a catering business though and those are mentioned in the article. Restaurants bring foot traffic to areas that other shops can benefit from where a catering business doesn't.
People cheating on their income taxes to the tune of thousands of dollars a year each in free lunches are now more likely to comply with the law. This seems like a step in the right direction.
It's a shame that bay area housing prices, which higher paid tech workers already struggle with, are even more of a burden for Facebook cafeteria workers, who make less money than many of those they serve every day. Thankfully, since your year-old article, Facebook cafeteria workers have unionized. I hope it's helped.
Still, it's unlikely that food service and retail workers in these cities are having an easier time making ends meet. The article you linked acknowledged that the cafeteria workers were making well above CA minimum wage - do you think the same can be said for all the restaurant/shop employees in the bay? Is there a reason we should be more concerned about some service industry employees over others?
Do you have a source for your claim that people are cheating on their income taxes to the tune of thousands of dollars a year?
> Still, it's unlikely that food service and retail workers in these cities are having an easier time making ends meet. The article you linked acknowledged that the cafeteria workers were making well above CA minimum wage - do you think the same can be said for all the restaurant/shop employees in the bay?
Hit the nail on the head.
All this concern for a relatively tiny number of tech cafeteria workers who are actually in much better shape than the vast majority of food industry employees. McDonalds pays the absolute minimum to its legions employees, and has to give them booklets that try (and fail) to do the math of how they can survive on their meager income. Meanwhile, bit tech pays their workers much better, but let's pick on them since they're evil!
are you kidding me? There's already enormous demand for unskilled labor. Every single cafe and restaurant i encounter here in the bay area has positions open in the kitchen, dishwasher and waiters. One restaurant had 9+ positions open!
And getting one of those jobs means fuck-all when tech workers have you priced out of living withing any sort of reasonable commute to your low-wage service industry job.
Not everyone who works at a tech company is an engineer. In fact, engineers probably do not even constitute the majority of the workforce for many large bay area "tech" companies.
Except not everyone would. I ate out like once a month at my old company that didn't provide food and now eat breakfast and lunch everyday at my new office that does. If free food is banned, a lot of people will be like me would prepare their own food decreasing the overall demand for workers to make food.
