Coffee is extremely popular, and too easy and cheap to meter when produced on site. Soda costs more and more hassle to buy (in cans/bottles), is extra work to make cheaply (install and maintain a tap), and mostly is grossly unhealthy and most people (outside of coder stereotype) don't want it at work.
SodaStream-style device fits the coffee mold, but it's less popular and not traditional.
I don't have numbers, but my expectation is that cost is of the same order of magnitude. I don't think coffee is all that cheap. I'm thinking of all the problems I've seen with the plumbing leaking, the machine being left on and burning requiring extensive cleaning, broken pots, and so forth, all on top of the material expense. Soda doesn't have to deal with the heat, but it does have pressure, so that probably kinda balances out.
Recently joined a company with legit soda machines(the fancy ones with exotic stuff like cream sodas), slim jims, ice cream, cookies, cakes and which buys lunch for the engineers every weekend. It's amazing. I came from a place where you had to pay 2 $ for a soda!
It's definitely one of the things that you don't realize when you don't have it, but when you do it's like heaven. It's really helped me get more work done since I can snack away and it encourages me to get up for walks around the office.
Eh, there's a downside to freebies, which is curation.
No matter how luxurious and all-encompassing, your free corporate fridges are not the supermarket, your free corporate cafeterias are not an east coast diner. They don't have everything you might want, just a decent selection.
We're deep in first world problems here, but there's a certain frustration to always drinking the drink that doesn't quite hit the spot, to searching the cafeteria menu for the least bad menu option. At least when you are paying the money yourself in the wider world, you can actually pick what you want.
Years ago (like, 1993 or so), our college CS class visited Jones Farm. One of the stops on the tour was a break room. All of the drinks were free at the time, whether it was coffee or coca cola. One of the engineers there remarked that at Microsoft only the caffeinated drinks were free. LOL. I just about believe it.
Contractors don't get perks like that anywhere, thanks to Vizcaino v. Microsoft. Withholding resources afforded to permanent employees is weird and counterintuitive, but it's how employers demonstrate compliance.
people really don't understand what a blessing it is to not have sodas be free. that kind of culture with an expectation of it (and 'snacks') being free will create a lot of fatness in the industry
> Maybe I should start my day with a line instead?
Bad idea.
Once, when I was less than a year out of school, I was in a design meeting with two of the most senior engineers on the project. They were WIRED, difficult to reason with, and sent me on an obviously wrong direction. I thought they drank 4-5 cups of coffee.
A few hours later I realized that the nonsense email that I got 10 minutes before the meeting, from the department head, titled "Lines in the conference room" meant that they probably snorted cocaine right before the meeting.
About a week later I had to redo all of my work using the exact design I pushed for. 2-3 weeks later I was relieved when I was laid off.
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If you want to legally and safely know what cocaine feels like, take 600mg of caffeine pills (3 No-Doze) as soon as you wake up in the morning, on an empty stomach. Don't do it before you need to do something important, or if you're doing something where you could loose your temper. Also, don't do it if you have heart problems.
Oh, I never would, and in that case I have no idea why people would do cocaine at all, because when I have too much coffee I get full of unsourced anxiety and the need to poop.
Two thirds of Americans (European numbers are similar, higher if anything) drink coffee every day, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, an addiction. I'm one of them for sure.
It's easier to just give people their fix, and there's a long history of this, paid coffee breaks were an early concession unions demanded during industrialization.
I assume that if it was provided from dispensers like at McD's, it would be similar in expense to coffee.