I wish I knew what the deal is with coffee and businesses.
I worked at one F500 company that eliminated the coffee for cost-saving reasons. The coffee was terrible, so I didn't exactly cry, but for this company it couldn't have cost more than, maybe, a million or so a year. I mean, I wouldn't want to write the check myself, but as a budgetary line-item, it would have been a rounding error.
I've worked at an office that dumped their Bunn drip machine that had worked since 1837 for a Keurig, because they didn't like the big twice-yearly bills for the coffee service. The Keurig has been replaced twice, and the cups fill the waste bin, and I guarantee they're paying more for coffee now.
It's really weird how people get hung up on the Coffee Question. I assume they're all tea drinkers and are being spiteful.
It's the same with janitorial services. When I first started, I was amazed at how clean the offices were. I even bragged to my wife after my interview that even the restrooms were spotless! I found out after starting that they had just been remodeled, and given more attention than normal.
Now a decade later, the ridiculous cost cutting has turned all the restrooms into disgusting places that are poorly cleaned. Except for the 4th floor. Where the VIPs work. Those restrooms are clean enough to eat off the floor.
I was friendly with the cleaning staff (I worked late a lot, and helped the facilities guys with stuff as needed). Turns out that their budget had been cut 25%, so they had to not only cut staff, but they lost all the productive people. So the good leftovers took care of the 4th floor while everyone else got the left side of the Bell curve. They would have been fine (it's janitorial work, not brain surgery), but they weren't given the time to do a good job. Trash cans were infrequently dumped, nothing was dusted, cubicles vacuumed randomly, and windows never cleaned. Except the 4th floor. Visiting it was like going to a penthouse suite in Vegas. Eventually they outsourced it completely to a company that cut corners to squeeze out a profit.
The same thing happened with our Security guards. They initially were company employees, had dedication and did a competent job. Then they were all replaced by a contractor. So now we have random guards who barely do anything.
I'm sure someone hit a KPI for saving the company money, but these nickel and dime actions make everyone question the company's commitment to their employees. If you won't provide clean restroom facilities, where else are you skimping?
Back when the App Store was a goldmine, I contemplated creating an app that would help people find public restrooms. I knew that mothers with babies were very sensitive about cleanliness and good changing tables etc, so this would be a "yelp for bathrooms." I mocked up the UI etc, and gave it a good thought and then did some schema work etc. Then I realized that all the users would be uploading the worst pictures imaginable; and we all know how bad bathrooms can be. There would be no way to moderate that type of thing, and I flushed the idea...
It's a tricky idea but honestly one that sounds worth pursuing. I certainly wouldn't mind knowing where all the nice restrooms are hiding within a random city or suburban block (for example that the one on level 22 of a particular skyscraper is public-access, or that the one on the lower level of a particular upmarket underground carpark is appreciably hard to reach, or that nobody realizes the one behind the service elevator lobby (that you only know about if you go to level 2 in this particular mall) is actually not in a restricted area).
I do sadly agree that the app's eww-score would rapidly converge to represent the worst-case-scenario baseline. This is the trickiest part; squinting and looking from the right angle I could see Apple pulling such an app from the app store, and possibly Google as well. (The apps would definitely just be WebView containers with little investment.) But I see that as a possibility, not a certainty; they would provide a useful service as well.
There are a lot of interesting ways to potentially solve the moderation problem. Fundamentally the most complex yet most viable approach would naturally be to train an ML model to distinguish along a spectrum from "WHAT" from "wait is that nearby? that looks better than my current favorite." This would need training data and lots of manual classification until it reached a point of viability, so you would very probably need a small army of assistants helping to both classify image inputs and override the model's output. The good news is that with the service just starting out "army" could probably mean "1 or 2 people"; the caveat-emptor news is that you'd need the ML model ready go from day 0 in order to not wind up behind the curve. You might also be able to achieve sustainability by requiring users to perform 5 or 10 moderation tasks, say per fortnight, to gain/retain access to the service. (You'd send the same tasks to multiple users and aggregate the results, not just to weed out junk inputs, but because people will score things differently.)
While controversial some algorithmic magic would probably be necessary to keep the service viable. For example if all you have are terrible photos of one particular location it may be prudent to hide all of them just in case people are only posting when it's bad, and show more prompts to take photos "especially if it looks good". Figuring out how to find the signal in the noise would rapidly become the long-term headache: for example, that a particular location is only cleaned by the thorough janitor every Tuesday, but because the building entrance that would lead people to that restroom closes early that day very few people use that location, and the only uploaded photo ever submitted on a Tuesday was from a passer-by who happened to be in the building staying late. 98% of that context would never be recoverable. The service would need to still provide actionable insights.
TL;DR I genuinely think that moderation is a solvable problem and that this is a cool idea - it's getting knowledge about it into people's heads that's the real challenge IMHO.
As an aside I think it would also be both useful and interesting to publish data dumps of all of the uploaded images (possibly with added watermarks) and attached classification data to give the ML community an extra dataset to play with - this would be an unusual but effective way to raise awareness about the service. Maybe even release the model, and possibly even open-source the website and app. This would be a sure-fire (but high-stakes) way to attract suggestions for improvements to the ML model, receive drive-by fixes for obscure bugs people hit in the field, etc.
It's a classic problem of not considering consequences.
Good coffee is barely more expensive than terrible coffee. Good tea is significantly more expensive than terrible tea, but few tea drinkers quaff it in the quantities that dedicated coffee-fiends demand. The overall cost of providing coffee, tea and a few other beverages is quite small compared to any other benefit of working in an office.
The cost of not having good coffee available for cheap or free is that people take coffee breaks that last much much longer, and nobody counts that time. The secondary consequence is that they don't spend the coffee break time talking with coworkers in a convivial surrounding, so they don't cross-pollinate ideas and share information.
I've worked for the same company for 18 years now, and it's not because of the excellent coffee service. The excellent coffee service is a result of being a company I like to work at.
Yeah, my thing is, I don't so much care about free coffee in and of itself. I can afford coffee. But it's the signal that it sends. To me, eliminating free coffee (and sodas, etc., per the @sgblank essay that @compiler-guy linked to) communicates that one or both of two things is true:
1. We're in really dire financial straits and you should all probably start looking for an exit while you can.
2. The company doesn't give a shit about the morale of the staff, and will therefore soon be in dire financial straits if it is not already, and you should all probably start looking for an exit while you can.
It's just a really, really bad look, IMO. As managers are so fond of saying... "it's bad optics."
I think it also feels off because you generally drink coffee to get more work done and stay alert. Especially while you are at work. So it's the strangest place to start saving money at.
What's far more likely is that compared to other common items on the budget sheets, coffee expenses are pretty transparent and seem to be exorbitantly high for being "just coffee", so it's an easy target to eliminate
I worked at one F500 company that eliminated the coffee for cost-saving reasons. The coffee was terrible, so I didn't exactly cry, but for this company it couldn't have cost more than, maybe, a million or so a year. I mean, I wouldn't want to write the check myself, but as a budgetary line-item, it would have been a rounding error.
I've worked at an office that dumped their Bunn drip machine that had worked since 1837 for a Keurig, because they didn't like the big twice-yearly bills for the coffee service. The Keurig has been replaced twice, and the cups fill the waste bin, and I guarantee they're paying more for coffee now.
It's really weird how people get hung up on the Coffee Question. I assume they're all tea drinkers and are being spiteful.