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by techsupporter
4531 days ago
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Understood and agreed with, but you know as well as I do that advertising matters. You said it yourself, people "just aren't seeing" the entire warehouses of food. Empty donation bin means a snap judgement to "heartless." According to the weekly Kroger ad for their store in north Fort Worth (Texas), a can of Simply Organic beans (very tasty beans, I should add) is $1 with a Kroger card; the same goes for a can of Hormel chili (no beans in chili, please). My back-of-the-mousepad calculations say that approximately 37 regular cans will fit in a 55-gallon drum, the kind usually used for these food drives. That means that, in a regular 8-story office building with two deposit locations per floor, filling all of them to the brim will cost $592. If you go the other way and just put three cans in the areas visible to the public, that's $111 to make a small but visible impact. Yep, it's advertising and showmanship, but that food also does go to people who will actually use it, so it has the benefit of doing a little bit of good, unlike most advertising. |
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I'll be completely honest: I think much of this anti-tech sentiment (such as: tech people don't give) is wishful thinking and willfully divorced from reality. Most large tech companies have public giving foundations and publicize their donation programs. Here are a few examples:
http://csr.cisco.com/pages/employee-volunteers
https://www.google.com/giving/
http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/yahoo-employee-foundation
http://www.microsoft.com/about/technicalrecognition/charity-...
These kinds of programs are strongly promoted at most tech companies. A large amount of giving happens outside these programs as well, but they do help establish a baseline well in excess of any food drive.
While trying to dig up the data for some of the bigger tech companies in the area I also stumbled across this report, which claims that area workers not only donate above the average but spend significantly more of their time actually going out into the community http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/bay-area-companies-giving... The article throws around the term "average" a lot which tends to raise my eyebrows, but it does mesh with my anecdotal experience that tech workers on the whole care a lot more about their community in the bay area than workers in general in other regions of the USA.