Meta Fired About Two Dozen Los Angeles Employees in October 2024 for Misusing $25 Meal Credits. One of Them Reportedly Earned $400,000 a Year and Had Spent the Credits on Toothpaste and Tea.
At its large campuses Meta feeds its staff for free, in cafeterias, three times a day. Its smaller offices have no cafeterias, so the company gave employees there the next best thing: a daily allowance on food delivery apps such as Grubhub and Uber Eats. Twenty dollars for breakfast, twenty-five for lunch, twenty-five for dinner. Fortune reported that in Los Angeles the dinner credit was for staff working past 6 p.m.
The rules were short. The credits were for meals, and the meals were to be eaten at the office. Nobody stood at the door checking bags, because the point of a perk like this is that nobody has to. Delivery apps that sell dinner also sell other things, and a credit is accepted for all of them.
What the Credits Bought
In October 2024 the Financial Times reported that Meta had fired roughly two dozen employees in its Los Angeles office after an internal investigation into the credits. According to that reporting and CNN's, the things bought with the dinner money included laundry detergent, wine glasses and acne treatment pads. Some employees had pooled their credits. Others had the food sent to their homes, which is not the office.
Meta distinguished between habit and accident. Staff who had broken the rules occasionally were reprimanded and kept their jobs. The ones fired were those judged to have abused the system over a long period of time, which is to say the system had been paying for wine glasses for a long period of time before anyone looked.
The Thrift Defence
The most detailed account came from one of the people fired, in a post on the anonymous workplace app Blind that the Financial Times reported. The former employee said they had earned about $400,000 a year, had worked nights and weekends, and had used the credits on toothpaste and tea from a Rite Aid pharmacy. When HR began asking questions, they admitted it. They were then fired, an experience they described as almost surreal.
The reasoning, as quoted, was economy. On days when they would not be eating at the office, "like if my husband was cooking or if I was grabbing dinner with friends, I figured I ought not to waste the dinner credit." The credit was treated as something owed, and leaving it unspent as a loss. Meta declined to comment on the firings.
The Steak Boxes
This was not the first time a Meta food perk had been renegotiated downward. In March 2022, as staff returned to offices on a hybrid schedule, The New York Times reported that the company was ending free laundry and dry cleaning and moving free dinner from 6 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Engadget noted this put dinner half an hour after the last shuttle home. Meta said it had "adjusted on-site services and amenities to better reflect the needs of our hybrid workforce," and raised the annual wellness stipend from about $700 to $3,000.
Some employees complained on an internal group that the culture was being eroded. An employee from the food service team replied: "I can honestly say when our peers are cramming three to 10 to-go boxes full of steak to take them home, nobody cares about our culture. A decision was made to try and curb some of the abuse while eliminating six million to-go boxes." According to Fortune, it became the most-liked response in the thread.
The Muffins on a Monday
The industry was reaching the same conclusion by other routes. In April 2023 Google's chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, sent a companywide memo announcing multi-year cuts to services, including fewer microkitchens, reduced cafe hours, fewer fitness classes and slower laptop replacement. "We've baked too many muffins on a Monday," she wrote, "seen GBuses run with just one passenger, and offered yoga classes on a Friday afternoon when folks are more likely to be working from home." Google later told Fortune that staplers and tape were still available at print stations, and that internal messages claiming otherwise were "misinformed."
The Audit
A delivery credit is a cheap perk because it trusts the person spending it. There is no cashier, no receipt check and no manager approving each toothbrush. That cheapness lasts exactly as long as the trust does. Once some of the credits turned out to be buying glassware, somebody had to go through the order histories, and somebody in HR had to hold the interviews.
The firings took place days before Meta began a separate restructuring across WhatsApp, Instagram and Reality Labs, which the company said was meant to align resources with "long-term strategic goals and location strategy." In the same month, one of the world's largest companies had staff going through the Rite Aid orders of an employee who says they were paid $400,000 a year.
The employee's stated reason for spending the credit was that it should not go to waste.
Filed from public reporting:
- Financial Times — "Meta fires staff for abusing $25 meal credits"
- CNN — "Meta fires employees for spending food allowances on personal items like acne pads and wine glasses"
- Fortune — "Meta reportedly fires staffer on $400K a year for spending $25 meal credits on toothpaste and tea"
- The Daily Beast — "Meta Fires Workers For Using Meal Credits to Buy Toiletries"
- Fortune — "Facebook employees criticizing the rollback of perks are blasted as freeloaders who 'don't care about company culture'"
- Engadget — "Meta employees say goodbye to perks like on-site laundry"
- Fortune — "Google has gone from offering perks like free massages to cutting back on snacks as the company tightens its belt"
- TechSpot — "Google is cutting back on employee laptops, perks, and even staplers & tape in money-saving measures"
