[Etheryte]

What you describe is functionally no different from an employee who goes to the office taking food from the cafeteria home with them to feed the family so they can avoid buying groceries themselves. Surely you can see how that's stealing?

[consteval]

That's not stealing if the food is free. Don't want people taking free food? Don't make the food free.

You're describing exactly the problem. The company wants to appear generous, but they're not actually generous. A generous person doesn't care if that food is meant to feed a family.

This hurts the employees, but it also hurts the company. Naturally this erodes trust. If I worked at Meta, I would be scared to submit an expense report.

It's the same reason a lot of companies have "unlimited PTO" but the employees are shivering in their boots when they take off. Because they don't trust their employer. This strategy works, kind of, but the long-term effects is the erosion of culture and inevitably performance.

Either be nice, or don't be. There's nothing wrong with not being nice - companies aren't people, they have no concept of morals. So who cares.

[ryandrake]

I worked at a company who, occasionally during a busy time, would order 5 or so boxes of pizza and set it out in the break room for the team, in case anyone needed to stay late and got a little hungry.

Well, it wasn't long before someone decided to just grab a few entire boxes of pizza and go home with them, abusing the perk so they could get a free meal for their family.

After a few times that happened, the pizza perk ended, because one guy ruined it for everyone.

Now we all know it was you!

EDIT: (sarcasm alert, I'm obviously not saying it was literally you, just someone with the same justifications)