First, lunch was for wimps (as espoused by Wall Street sociopaths, circa 1987), then lunch was an opportunity for “unplanned collaborations” (Steve Jobs’ idea that accidental and social meetings fuelled ideas). Now, lunch is apparently a philanthropic act. Michael Bloomberg is hoping to encourage employees at the new £1.1bn Norman Foster-designed offices of his financial media company to get away from their desks and go outside the building for lunch.
The founder and chief executive of Bloomberg told the Evening Standard he wanted his 4,000 London employees to spread the wealth. “I want people to get out and enjoy the local economy. We are going in the opposite direction to Google – we encourage people to go outside.” Although the offices will still have “pantries” stocked with food.
Tech giants such as Google and Facebook famously provide everything their employees might need, such as on-site medical clinics and gyms. Most intriguing to those of us who still have to make our own sandwiches or pay for lunch, is the cornucopia of free food on offer. In Silicon Valley, three free meals a day “is considered normal”, as the Financial Times put it, noting that file-hosting site Dropbox has the best food of all the tech companies.
It may be a little unfair to criticise the vast campuses of tech giants for not encouraging their employees to put money into local businesses – Facebook’s 57-acre US HQ is in a remote, marshy part of Silicon Valley, where there is not much chance of popping out to the local coffee shop – but that is harder to justify in central London, Dublin or Paris. “Tech offices can have a kind of deadening effect on the city,” Allison Arieff of Spur, a non-profit urban research centre, told this paper last year. “Because they now provide their employees with everything on site for free – from coffee to dry-cleaning to haircuts – local businesses are often forced to close down when they move in.”
You can view the increasingly impressive office canteen culture as a perk of the job, or as essentially prison food cooked by Michelin-starred chefs. Back in the 90s, long before Google came along with its famed free lunches, one company was offering its workers a vast range of food and drink at work. “I want people to be well-fed and satisfied. I want them to be able to grab a cup of coffee with a colleague and hash things out,” said the boss in a 1995 interview. “But most of all I want them to stay here. I don’t want them leaving.” That was one Michael Bloomberg, who it appears, two decades on, has woken up to the benefits of occasionally leaving the office.
