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When I first moved to Florida I worked for a company I'll call "HS." One of the perks of the job was that I could cross a hallway, grab a Coke from a fridge, and drink it. I had to write my company name on a piece of paper, so they could be billed for the Coke, but we were encouraged (and of course allowed) to drink and eat (they had some chips and things too) all we wanted.

I estimate that I drank about three cans of Coke/day, sometimes four if I skipped lunch. At $0.75/can that comes to $3/day, and about (30*5/7 = 21 work days/month) $63/month. I was on the high end - Alison and Dave rarely drank, occasionally having a water or a bag of chips. So let's say $50/month/employee, and that's if they get ripped off on the cost of Coke.

As Eric points out, I wouldn't notice an extra $50/month on my paycheck. I simply wouldn't. I could spend that $50 on Coke, but the overhead and worry of buying it, stocking it, bringing it in to work, keeping it cold, etc. is simply not worth it. Instead, for $50/month/employee, my boss (Jeff) kept employee morale higher than had I been forced to bring my own beverages. Like Eric says, $50/month/employee creates more than its value in morale, enthusiasm, loyalty, and warm, fuzzy feelings.

Shortly after I began working for HS, a bloke named Neil looked to merge his company with ours. He asked me what things were important to me, and I joked that I wanted free Coke. He promised me, not once, not even twice, but no less than three times that I'd get my fridge-o-Coke if it'd make me happy. I assured him it would. It had for a month and a half already!

We merged, we moved to the new offices, and there was no Coke. I asked, was told we'd get some soon. A week went by. Then two. Finally, having asked a few more times, I was told "if I had to get you Coke, I'd have to get beverages for everyone." This from a man who paid himself $20,000/month. Who knows what his wife made (they owned the company).

How'd that make me feel? Well, as good as free Coke made me feel, this made me feel bad. Or worse. It showed absolutely no honesty, absolutely no trust, and a certain level of spite for us "lame workers."

Neil was the worst boss I've ever had. I've not had many, but his list of atrocious behavior certainly doesn't stop with the coke. Neil's a salesman - he's not a technologist. The secretaries in that company know more about technology than he does. Still do, I'm sure. Within a few months of our merger, the original four of us - Jeff, Dave, Alison, and I had all left.

Since I'd like to stay on topic, and not turn this into a rant against Neil (I'd never stop typing), I'd just like to mention an example which stands in direct opposition to the "free Coke" thing. Neil had some software installed on the network that put a red ASCII "stop" hand on your screen when you went to an "unapproved" site. We later found out that Neil was emailed with the identity of the "offending" individual and the URL.

The "unapproved" sites consisted of, off the top of my head, playboy.com, travelocity.com, apple.com, cnn.com, espn.com, aol.com, monster.com, and several others. I'd never look at porn at work, but playboy.com had an interesting design I wanted to copy at the time. Discovery of this "red hand of death" led to a few interesting behaviors:

• Instead of working, Dave, Alison, and myself spent most of the rest of the afternoon visiting as many sites as we could think of to see whether they were blocked or not. Dollar Cost: $200 in lost productivity; Morale Cost: Medium.
• I sat there and pressed "reload" on cnn.com about three hundred times once, triggering the system to email Neil every single time. He came in five minutes later more than slightly pissed. Dollar Cost: only about $5, but highly amusing. Morale Cost: Medium
• In order to avoid the "red hand of death" I wrote a PHP proxy server, stuck it in a frameset, and distributed the location of the script to Alison and Dave so that we could get our work done. After all, information coming from our own server was not blocked, and this allowed us to go anywhere we wanted. I tested it by actually looking at porn for a few hours, simply because I could. Dollar Cost: $250 in lost productivity; Morale Cost: None (it was actually a morale booster, but not for the company, but rather for our individual spirits).

So there you have it. In one month, Neil cost himself a lot of aggravation, $450, and an immeasurable amount of morale. One day (September 17, to be specific, less than one week after the whole 9/11¹ incident), I simply stopped going to work. I'd not begun work until June 15. You do the math - I wasn't with Neil very long.

A little Coke goes a long way.

¹ Alison, on 9/11, was quite worried as she has lots of family in New York City. Obviously we weren't going to get much work done that day. Neil made us stay the entire day, even though none of our customers were open for business, and at one point actually came in to the Web developer office and told Alison "I have family in New York, and they're fine, so yours are too. Hang up the phone and get to work." Had Dave and I not been so shocked by this display of compassion, I think we'd have both laid Neil out. Ahh, hindsight is 20/20…

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