My company signed up for a $1000/year subscription-based water cooler
Everyone likes to blame loose VC money for silly stuff like this, but I have a slightly more nuanced theory about ridiculous office perks:<p>Office managers&#x2F;office teams have very few concrete metrics. Beyond a binary &quot;is the office functional&quot; (e.g. are there enough desks, does the electricity work) there is pretty much no way to measure job performance. That&#x27;s not to say their work doesn&#x27;t have any impact. Anyone who has worked in a poorly laid out office has dealt with the corresponding productivity drain. However, it&#x27;s really hard to measure that boost&#x2F;loss and nearly impossible to accurately attribute it.<p>The solution is for office managers to do ridiculous but easily quantifiable things like spend money on subscription water coolers, an on-demand smoothie blending machine [0], potted plants that cost $800 [1].<p>If you are an office worker frustrated by this trend, you should invent some performance metric for office managers and then sell something that improves it. You&#x27;ll instantly suck up all the VC money going to these other startups.<p>[0]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;getreplenish.com&#x2F;#1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;getreplenish.com&#x2F;#1</a>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.leonandgeorge.com&#x2F;plants&#x2F;large-desert-cactus&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.leonandgeorge.com&#x2F;plants&#x2F;large-desert-cactus&#x2F;</a>