The supply of people who can reliably turn time at a keyboard into code that solves problems people are willing to pay to have solved is wildly outstripped by demand. You're just continuing to see that in a world where most other industries don't have a supply problem.
Also, as rationale people will be happy to tell you, buying my employees lunch is a screaming deal.
An employee going to lunch takes at least an hour: walk to takeout, wait in line (everyone gets hungry at the same time), walk back and eat. I can recover at least 30 minutes by paying to have lunch delivered every day. Plus, for better or for worse, it costs me roughly $16 pp per day but it would cost me probably $25 to pay an employee $16. I didn't write the tax rules, but I can optimize within them.
Note there is also not a single person in my company who makes less than $32 (16*2) per hour. So I'm very happy to pay $16 to recover, on average, 30 minutes of their time.
Why not make them work through lunch and provide overhead delivery of liquid nutritional supplements and coffee through a rubber tube? And you could have their desk chair plumbed to the sewer line so they would not need to take bathroom breaks. You might recover another 60 minutes of time during the day.
Also, as rationale people will be happy to tell you, buying my employees lunch is a screaming deal.
An employee going to lunch takes at least an hour: walk to takeout, wait in line (everyone gets hungry at the same time), walk back and eat. I can recover at least 30 minutes by paying to have lunch delivered every day. Plus, for better or for worse, it costs me roughly $16 pp per day but it would cost me probably $25 to pay an employee $16. I didn't write the tax rules, but I can optimize within them.
Note there is also not a single person in my company who makes less than $32 (16*2) per hour. So I'm very happy to pay $16 to recover, on average, 30 minutes of their time.