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The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

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Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#181

Post by cmrdporcupine »

jeromegv wrote: post #132
save_ferris wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive been saying for years that airlines should do this. Add the price of an alcoholic beverage to everyone's ticket and then give those who want one a "free" drink. I never understood why they opted to go with ruthless cuts and declining customer experience.

For a while, Porter Airlines (Canada) would offer free coffee + free cookies out of their terminal in Toronto. They would also offer you a free beer (a full 500ml, not the 341ml one) on the flight if this was an afternoon/evening flight. I feel that a lot of their expansion was just the word of mouth "OH AND THEY GIVE YOU FREE COOKIES". Their flight might have been a bit more expensive, but the amount of good will th…

That's sad. I used to go to NYC from Toronto for work once every month or two and I always flew Porter, and it was the best. The cookies and coffee was a nice touch. Comfortable lounge, etc. But that was 8, 9 years ago, and the last time I flew Porter was to Burlington, VT (before they cut that route) to go skiing, and they were in the process of renovating the lounge and changing things around. There was still free coffee but the shortbread cookies were nowhere to be seen; I could see things were changing.

That route was the best, BTW; I'd leave my house at 6:30am or so by taxi, get an early morning flight to Newark, take the train to Penn station, walk from there to the office and still arrive before many of my NY coworkers were at the office. Once we got bought by Google I found I could still make it to the Google NYC office in time for breakfast service. Memories :-)

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#182

Post by chrisseaton »

jankotek wrote: post #6

>The problem isn't the price Price was absolutely the problem. Soldiers were paid about $600 year. Not much for a job where you risk your life and dont have much of personal freedom or comfort. Free food was part of benefits. Charging soldiers for it seems ludicrous, they can not just leave, and go to nearest cafe.

I think you're misunderstanding. The Red Cross isn't the catering organisation of the Army. It's just a private organisation.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#183

Post by MauranKilom »

Etheryte wrote: post #72
torgard wrote: post #4

As an aside, I am really, really surprised and happy to see a plain-text website available, if you decline cookies. That's a neat approach.

As someone who has turned nearly all cookies off, I appreciate (and use) the plaintext site as well, but there's really no actual reason why they couldn't serve the regular site without cookies all the same.

I don't think it's GDPR compliant, but I'll take it over some other obnoxious "solutions" out there.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#184

Post by 0xy »

013a wrote: post #164
0xy wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their enterprise pricing is disgustingly grandiose. At our relatively small scale (just a few tens of millions of requests per month) they wanted five figures a month after the price change. Nope. We'll just roll our own solution. Whichever sales and marketing guy is responsible for that atrocious pricing will ultimately be responsible for the product failing. I don't know who's going to pay those absurd prices.

That is crazy when APM is such a saturated market. Granted, there aren't a ton of GraphQL-focused APM tools that are automatically aware of field resolution times and such, but GraphQL makes it a cinch to support; if a company like Datadog came in and added it to their already existing APM suite, Engine would be finished. Datadog APM is expensive, but it's generally interesting beyond GraphQL, and its not five figure…

Datadog already has an Apollo integration. It's not as good as Apollo Engine but when it's 80% of the product for 1% of the price then it's a no-brainer. We already paid Datadog anyway.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#185

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I tend to make all my stuff open-source and free. I have no intentions of ever charging for it.

I do this for a couple of reasons:

1) "Brand-building." I'm developing a "personal brand," and I do it for a similar reason as companies give away free T-shirts with their logo.

2) Lead by Example. I have a beef with the quality of most software, these days. I have decided not to whine about it.

Instead, I just write my own software the way that I think it should be written, and leave it out there. Since quality isn't really a coefficient in most developers' minds, these days, it doesn't get much attention; which is fine by me.

So...sort of "virtue signaling," but in an even more passive-aggressive way.

I also have a personal policy of making all my work public, because I am used to it, and I think that it helps me to write better software. You always vacuum before the in-laws visit.

I would never charge for my open source (MIT-Licensed) work, but I also put the source up there for the stuff I do charge for (a tiny pittance). It isn't licensed for reuse, but it's out there.

If someone hires me to write proprietary software, then I won't put it out there (unless that's what the customer wants). I did a great deal of "behind the firewall" work that is likely to never see the light of day (indeed, much of it was in products that were never even officially released).

Otherwise, I'm likely to keep putting my work out there for free; whether or not anyone else cares.

I care.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#186

Post by TaylorAlexander »

eaenki wrote: post #175
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting comment! I have this relatively unconventional theory that, if we use automation just right and make the cost of food production, delivery, and preparation low enough, and also do so where ownership of the machinery is distributed throughout society, that we could make it a social norm to give anyone who needs it free food. All in a voluntary system. We just need to make the actual cost of the whole suppl…

That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Not only it shows a complete lack of understanding about agriculture (e.g a cheeseburger sells $1 but just the water would cost more than that if not subsidized -> which leads to water waste which is scarce) but just think about it... agriculture itself is the original sin of humanity, which lead to the few great things that humanity built but also to the destruction of this pla…

My robot will, if we succeed, make it much cheaper to do organic agriculture. This would reduce our reliance on herbicides. Long term I hope we can automate more biointensive agriculture that uses complementary plants to ward off pests. If you truly feel that agriculture is an "original sin" then we need to fix that. Because we can't stop making food. We can only make food production more environmentally friendly.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#187

Post by greedo »

frakkingcylons wrote: post #79
manuel_w wrote: post #71

It is interesting to me how much free givaways people get in America. In Austria (and maybe some other parts of Europe, not sure), not only that free refills are unheard of, you even get charged for ketchup sauce at McDonalds. (The minimal allowed food quality is higher, though, so there might be economic reasons on top of, I believe, primarily societal reasons.) It is charged somewhere around 40 to 50 Eurocent per 2…

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that if fast food places charged for condiments or soda refills in America, customers would become violent with employees. A customer shot employees at a McDonald's because the customer wasn't allowed to dine in the restaurant: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-07/police...

When I worked at McDonalds during college, we implemented a surcharge for people wanting extra sauce for McNuggets. It was like $.25 each. If you bought a 6 pack you got 2 things of sauce. A 9 pack came with 3, and a 20 pack came with 5. So really, you got a lot of sauce included.

But people were pissed. It was only a small portion of customers who even asked for more than the include packages, but they were hot about it.

When I first started, we didn't even give free refills of soda or coffee. And I remember, we had this group of senior citizens who came in every morning as a group to just drink coffee and BS. Well, the tax rate in CA changed one day, bumping the price of a cup of joe up a penny. You'd think we had stolen their Social Security checks. They were outraged. Trust me, you do not want a pissed off senior citizen yelling at you when you're 16.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#188

Post by jbay808 »

jeromegv wrote: post #132
save_ferris wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive been saying for years that airlines should do this. Add the price of an alcoholic beverage to everyone's ticket and then give those who want one a "free" drink. I never understood why they opted to go with ruthless cuts and declining customer experience.

For a while, Porter Airlines (Canada) would offer free coffee + free cookies out of their terminal in Toronto. They would also offer you a free beer (a full 500ml, not the 341ml one) on the flight if this was an afternoon/evening flight. I feel that a lot of their expansion was just the word of mouth "OH AND THEY GIVE YOU FREE COOKIES". Their flight might have been a bit more expensive, but the amount of good will th…

For what it's worth, those were also some of the most delicious prepackaged cookies I've ever eaten. It's not just that they were free.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#189

Post by catlas3r »

blululu wrote: post #16

Interestingly enough I used to work at a company where the one any only benefit was occasional doughnuts on Friday (we did not get health insurance/dental/vision/retirement). And honestly we would all be pissed on the days when Doughnut Friday was cancelled.

Ask any tech worker in an office about the free snack selection. My coworkers get genuinely outraged when we trade out one brand of prepackaged nuts for another, or when their preferred soda goes out of rotation. Never mind they all make six figures and could easily purchase whatever snacks they wanted. The cost of the employee time spent complaining every time something changes here easily outweighs the cost of the entire snack program.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#190

Post by blibble »

RandallBrown wrote: post #13
blakesterz wrote: post #8

I witnessed something like this when I worked at a Six Flags amusement park (wasn't 6F at the time) that had a decent size water park. They did exit surveys every night, asking as many people as they could if things were ok, and one year they also asked people "Would you pay extra for the water park", it was free as part of admission. So they wanted to know if people would pay extra. People said yes. Something like 9…

A park in Indiana, Holiday World, did something sorta the opposite. They figured out how much the average guest paid for drinks, then raised the ticket prices that much but made all drinks free in the park. It was a huge success. People expect ticket prices to go up occasionally and they expect to be gouged for drinks. By getting "free" drinks, it felt like a huge value. (At least for me when I visited.) I bet it mad…

they save on the staff selling drinks too, at Holiday World the drinks dispensers are littered around the park in the same way water fountains are at others

(except six flags where they'll try and gouge you there too)

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