<story><title>The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009)</title><url>http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jmduke</author><text>This reminds me of a great blog post, &lt;i&gt;Goodbye Microsoft, Hello Facebook&lt;/i&gt; by Philip Su (&lt;a href=&quot;http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/goodbye-microsoft-hello-facebook/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/goodbye-microsoft-hello-facebo...&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;We used to get Dove Bars and beers all the time.  It felt like free food was on offer at least once a week, usually with a pretense of some small milestone to celebrate.  Why did we cut stuff like this?  (I know the boring fiscal reasons why.  I’m asking the deeper why, as in, “Was it worth the savings?  Is Microsoft better now that we’ve cut these costs?”)&lt;p&gt;One day, a sign appeared on a soda fridge in RedWest saying something to the effect of, “Did you know that drinks cost Microsoft [ed: millions of dollars] a year? Sodas are your perk at work.  Don’t bring them home.”  This depressed me on too many levels to enumerate, but I’ll toss out a few:&lt;p&gt;- Someone had enough time to get these signs professionally printed and affixed to our fridges.&lt;p&gt;- It was someone’s salaried, 40-hour-a-week job to do things like this.&lt;p&gt;- Someone thought soda smuggling was a big enough “problem” at Microsoft to draw attention to it.&lt;/i&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FireBeyond</author><text>I worked in RedWest a few years ago. People were fired, more than one, because they were caught bringing in -roller luggage- multiple times a week to fill with varying drinks. It was only noticed and a problem because Catering noticed they were needing to refill those fridges more than twice as much (and there were four commercial sliding glass door fridges) - so a group of people were taking multiple fridges a week home. That&apos;s probably in the order of a couple of thousand dollars a week.&lt;p&gt;-That- was the problem. Not people like me who might grab a can of Talking Rain as we left the office for the commute home.&lt;p&gt;So when the smuggling &quot;&quot;problem&quot;&quot; amounted to thousands of dollars a week of goods going missing from one building/floor alone, then yes, they drew attention to it.&lt;p&gt;As for his other points:&lt;p&gt;- Microsoft has its own inhouse printing departments. It was hardly a project in itself to arrange for a small plastic sign to be made and glued.&lt;p&gt;- Yes, Catering has people whose salaried, 40 hour a week job is to handle the logistics of food ordering, and predict supply and demand. People like this are needed when you have upwards of 50,000 people working in your facility.&lt;p&gt;- a $100,000/year theft problem is worthy of most people&apos;s attention. If you&apos;re stealing multiple commercial fridges-worth of soda a week, it&apos;s not even that you&apos;re taking it home - you&apos;re almost certainly reselling it. So it&apos;s not even a perk, it&apos;s a commercial gain. Maybe I should have been raiding the Office Supplies and selling them, a la Dilbert.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009)</title><url>http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jmduke</author><text>This reminds me of a great blog post, &lt;i&gt;Goodbye Microsoft, Hello Facebook&lt;/i&gt; by Philip Su (&lt;a href=&quot;http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/goodbye-microsoft-hello-facebook/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/goodbye-microsoft-hello-facebo...&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;We used to get Dove Bars and beers all the time.  It felt like free food was on offer at least once a week, usually with a pretense of some small milestone to celebrate.  Why did we cut stuff like this?  (I know the boring fiscal reasons why.  I’m asking the deeper why, as in, “Was it worth the savings?  Is Microsoft better now that we’ve cut these costs?”)&lt;p&gt;One day, a sign appeared on a soda fridge in RedWest saying something to the effect of, “Did you know that drinks cost Microsoft [ed: millions of dollars] a year? Sodas are your perk at work.  Don’t bring them home.”  This depressed me on too many levels to enumerate, but I’ll toss out a few:&lt;p&gt;- Someone had enough time to get these signs professionally printed and affixed to our fridges.&lt;p&gt;- It was someone’s salaried, 40-hour-a-week job to do things like this.&lt;p&gt;- Someone thought soda smuggling was a big enough “problem” at Microsoft to draw attention to it.&lt;/i&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>malexw</author><text>That&apos;s how the free pop at RIM ended. The story I heard is that Mike L saw an employee loading flats of coke into the trunk of their car one day, and the free pop ended shortly after that.</text></comment>