At least here in Australia, (about 2 decades ago) they seriously stopped having free coffee - or any other drink except tap water - for their employees.
Yep, it's as brain damaged an idea as it seems, and yep it's also an accurate depiction of how little they think of their employee productivity.
Mid 2010s I worked in the UK office and we had to bring our own tea/coffee/milk. I don't think we had any 'benefits' that you'd associate with modern tech companies.
The team I was in had no money to expense so for the first few months I worked using just the company provided laptop with no peripherals, and had to wait for someone leaving to be able to grab their external monitor and a laptop stand. Team/Company morale was very low in my time there.
I'm currently enjoying free coffee here at the IBM RTP, NC office. We have free soda machines, free snacks, and free Taco Tuesdays (today, yay!). Pre-pandemic we had more free snacks including fresh fruit, but for some reason they got rid of the fruit. It's not that bad honestly. Not a big fan of the RBA though :(
Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (USA). It sits between 3 cities, Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill which each contain very well known universities, NC State, Duke, and UNC Chapel Hill. Lot of tech, bio/ag, and research hubs here.
Yes, most of IBM charged you for coffee. And this is when they were still doing okay. The real gem was around 2010 when my location stopped picking up trash from offices and cubes. You had to dump your bin into the big one at the end of the building.
Perfect example of missing the forest for the trees business practices based on seeing only numbers and missing any sort of coherent picture.
The money wasted on the employees dumping their own bins probably offsets the money saved on cleaning staff directly by an order of magnitude, not to mention the indirect losses of people being annoyed/pissed and leaving.
I worked at a US IBM site for a couple weeks a few years back and they had an engineer assigned to my group who would walk with us to the kitchenette and pay for our coffee from the machine each time. I hope he was reimbursed!
Yep, it's as brain damaged an idea as it seems, and yep it's also an accurate depiction of how little they think of their employee productivity.