The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
This is a good cautionary tale and one I&#x27;ve seen played out in the tech industry with food. Even in the 80&#x27;s it wasn&#x27;t uncommon for a tech company to have a &quot;beer bust&quot; on Friday&#x27;s where drinks and snacks were served as a social gathering for employees at the end of the work week. It was a turning point in employee relations when the VP of HR at Sun cancelled the weekly beer bust. Similarly at Google when they decided to scale back the legendary &quot;mini-kitchens&quot; full of snacks, &quot;healthy alternatives&quot; that were slowly pared down.<p>One sociologist I read wrote, and I&#x27;m paraphrasing, &quot;Sharing food with another is an action of great significance. Evolutionary, the sharing of food by hunter gatherers was more significant than sex in establishing a mutually bonding relationship.&quot; They went on to discuss the importance that meals played in our history and why we &quot;throw a feast&quot; to welcome heroes, and the Jesus&#x27; &quot;big reveal&quot; happened at a meal.<p>The main point was that when you share food with someone you trigger a very ancient and well established mechanism. Conversely, when you <i>stop</i> sharing food with someone, you signal their ancient brain &quot;I don&#x27;t trust you any more, we aren&#x27;t friends.&quot;<p>Now whether or not that thought&#x2F;emotion comes to the surface, it&#x27;s very clear that the for many people the change from &quot;sharing food with you&quot; to &quot;not sharing food with you&quot; changes how they see their relationship with you. What is perhaps worse is that the damage is instant and irreversible. Even if you start sharing again, the people you stopped sharing with, even temporarily[1], will no longer feel the same trust that they felt before.<p>At tech companies those people leave and eventually you have all employees who only remember the current system and so you&#x27;re at a new &quot;normal.&quot;<p>Bottom line, taking away &quot;free&quot; food is waaaay more impactful on company morale&#x2F;relationships than you would ever imagine unless you had researched it. Thus, it happens over and over again. And even though I <i>know</i> a company is just trying to make me like it by giving me free food, I can&#x27;t keep myself from being positively effected by it. That response is buried somewhere deep inside my head that doesn&#x27;t allow for excision.<p>[1] Yes, there are ways to temporarily stop and not disconnect but that involves messaging before one stops sharing to both provide the external reason for the change and the conditions on which the change would revert back to sharing.