consumption

My employer's evening meal plan just changed ... and I think it's going to shorten my life dramatically.

Let me tell you about the old plan first. We work a lot of overtime in my profession, and one of the nice benefits of the job was the meal plan. Our regular work day consists of 7 hours, it's a regular 9-to-5 work day minus one hour for lunch. Well if you worked 2 hours or more past your normal shift (a 9+ hour day), you got a meal allowance of $10. Every evening the office orders dinner from a local restaurant, and you can apply your $10 allowance towards ordering food. The way that it worked was, you were automatically credited $10 on your paycheck whenever you worked 2 hours or more beyond your 7 hour shift. If you ordered dinner, that was deducted from your paycheck and it all balanced out. If you didn't order dinner, you got the $10 and you could pick up something on the way home, or go out and get dinner in the middle of the evening, or even just go home, eat something out of your fridge and pocket the $10. That was the old plan.

The plan had its own complications and downsides, but it was generally a decent plan. One downside was that you had to order dinner at 4:30pm in order for it to arrive at the office around 6pm. I don't know about you, but I am rarely thinking about what I want to eat for dinner at 4:30pm. That's like senior citizen dinner time right there, sometimes I'm not even thinking about food at 6pm. I'm used to eating late, more like 8 or 9pm. As a result, I often missed or skipped the 4:30pm order and kept on working. I'd often work until 7 or 8, and then pick up something on the way home, or eat at home. And often I'd be pocketing the $10, tax-free, or the change left over from buying something.

Now let me tell you about the new plan. You now have to work 3 hours past your normal shift (a 10+ hour day) to qualify for a meal allowance. To make it appear that you're not getting completely shafted, they upped the allowance to $15. Sounds great, but that means that you now have to work until 8:00pm or 8:30pm (if you take a half-hour to eat dinner) to qualify for that $15. If you order dinner at the office, you've committed to staying that late now or else you'll eat the bill. But if you don't order dinner, guess what, under the new policy the money doesn't credit automatically to your paycheck. You now have to submit a receipt after the fact, to get reimbursed up to the $15 max allowance. No receipt, no meal allowance.

The new plan is clearly intended to save the firm some money. The 3 hour requirement is just enough to make it unpleasant enough of a stay that most people won't benefit from this plan. I think most people are ok with working 1 or 2 hours overtime on a fairly regular basis. You make a little more money, and if you only work 1 hour or 1.5 hours no big deal, you're still getting home at a decent time and can have dinner. But 3 hours, that puts me into the 8:30 to 9pm timeframe by the time I get home. You can't expect your spouse to wait until 9pm to have dinner with you every night, can you? I don't. So I tell V. to go ahead and eat without me. I just pick something up on the way home, and eat it when I get home.

Oh yeah, and I get shafted by the receipt deal too. Sometimes I pick up food, and don't get a receipt. Nothing like ordering a $14 pizza, taking it home thinking it's covered, and then realizing that you didn't get a receipt. Cha-ching, the Firm just saved some more cash.

So how does all this affect my wellbeing and health? Think about what kinds of places are open past 9pm. Most decent restaurants are closed at that point. It's 9pm, you're tired from working your 10.1 hour day, you don't want to wait too long to pick up something on the way home, where do you end up? Fast food, amigo. Taco Bell is open 24 hours, McDonalds and Jack-in-the-Box are open until 2am, and there's always the local am/pm convenience store for a microwave burrito. Now that's good nutrition right there. And you know what, after working that 10+ hour workday, I am not going to let the firm just pay for a $7 combo and call it a night. No way man, I am going in for as close to $15 as I can get. I figure I earned it.

So there I am last night, pulling up in my Lexus to the Carl's Jr. like a high roller. Gimme 2 burgers, 2 milkshakes, some CrissCut fries, and some fried zucchini. Total comes to $14.51. If they had a $0.49 cent item I'd order that too.

That kind of eating can't be good for me. I hope the firm is reinvesting the money it's saving with this policy change into some medical plan benefits...