Employee not worth the gas to cook her lunch?

Gas prices this winter have been horrible. As a result people are pulling the “gas belt” tighter to conserve money. There is a shared kitchen in the building where my company is located. An employee of another company fixes Chicken Pot Pies for lunch in the gas oven. The owner of the company she works for told her not to fix her Chicken Pot Pies in the gas oven anymore because of high gas bills. Word of mouth carried this story through the entire building within an hour.

Lets just say the company owner – for all his trying to be fiscally responsible – didn’t come off looking so good. That’s a lot of negative press caused by a little Chicken Pot Pie. So, I started thinking – How much did he really save and was it worth the negative backlash in the employee community?

A quick unscientific search led me to a website from the Gas Foodservice Equipment Network. I’m sure this isn’t exact but I’m willing to bet it gets me into the ballpark. The quote I found is, “Looking at it from a “pure cost” view, the gas oven costs during the one hour test ranged from $0.15 – $0.43 cents per hour…”

We’ve got an old gas oven in the shared kitchen. Assuming it’s not very efficient let’s boot the gas cost up to $.050 cents per hour. I think Chicken Pot Pies take about 45 minutes to bake. Figuring some fudge factor and time to warm up the oven, let’s just call it an even hour. If the employee in question ate Chicken Pot Pies cooked in the gas oven every day of the work-week, we’d have the following:

5 days * 1 hour * $0.50 cents/hour gas cost = $2.50 per week

So, this employee – worst case scenario of being a total Chicken-Pot-Pie-aholic – can assume she’s not worth an extra $2.50 per week to eat her half-hour unpaid lunch onsite where she is available to her coworkers if needed.

To be fair to the company owner,figuring a 40-hour work-week, that comes out to $0.0625 cents per hour raise. Not to mention (but I will) that if a person eats that many Chicken Pot Pies a week, there’s probably an extra cost in water for toilet flushes. (Do I really have to explain this part?) I didn’t do the cost-sleuthing to determine this cost (but I did find an odd site about cats on the toilet if you’re interested).

Since we’re talking about postive/negative opinions, the company owner is also notorious for visiting a coffee shop in the morning before work and carrying in a Starbucks midday. Let’s just guess about $4-5 a coffee on average. That’s about $20 to $50 a week. Not to mention (but I will) the extra cost in water for toilet flushes. (I’m still not going to go into detail on tihs part.)

Conclusion:

Disgruntled, hungry employee. Negative community opinion. Going down the road to putting in pay toilets.

Bad move on the owner’s part.