It doesn't sound capital efficient at all - instead they've got people deliberately milling about doing nothing while waiting for the "penalty window" to lapse.

If anything, this is a brilliant example of how applying measurable incentives can distort motivations and make people do stupid things to please whatever metrics are being measured.

Left to their own devices, these very smart and ambitious people would no doubt make up their own mind about the value of their time and ensure they don't waste time milling about when they're busy, and so go to lunch early or late or in the middle if they're not too busy anyway or want to chat with someone in the queue. Instead, they're now forcing themselves to fit a stupid "penalty window" to save a few bucks, because that's what the incentive system in place dictates.

Measurements are a very, very dangerous beast. Apply with caution.

(Great book on the topic: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Measuring-Managing-Performance-Organ... )

So instead of a hump at 12:30, they've created two humps at 11:30 and 1:30?

Why not offer a continuous discount curve? If you show up at 1:25, you get 23% off your meal, so there is only a 2% discount for dawdling 5 extra minutes in the food line before paying.

I have completely forgotten about the discount outside of rush hour at Goldman. It just didn't figure much in my lunch time planning, and I loved lunch.

The one remarkable thing about their cafeteria that stuck with me was the cutlery. All disposable utensils outside of chopsticks were made out of biodegradable corn and they were the best disposable utensils I have ever used. The utensils were full sized and the right stiffness. There were no sharp edges and the texture was slightly rough, much nicer than plastic.

Since leaving GS, the only thoughts I had about their cafeteria was why haven't I encountered as nice disposable utensils as I had there.

Meanwhile, very far from all of this, with no press, no hacker news front page, no praise for their cleverness, street restaurants in Brazil located on areas with high-density of corporate offices have been doing this for years. No capital efficience fancy wording, they just realized that people were going elsewhere because they had a very long line and did something about it.

Funny how hype and self-importance reinforce themselves. This is big news about what looks like a fantastic idea from the incredible minds of insanely clever bankers. If you are Goldman Sachs, whatever you do must be clever. If you are CNBC whatever you talk about must be important.

They did this because they're obsessed with avoiding queues and doing everything efficiently, but have a culture where everyone will queue up for 10+ minutes waiting to avoid paying a couple dollars more? Seems silly the way the author explains the motivations.

They're not taking this far enough, imposing a blanket 25% discount nothing but autocratic perversion of what could be a functioning lunch time credit market. They could maximize revenues and employee throughput in real time! Sure, there'd be some overhead, but financialization axiomatically improves efficiency. Perhaps there could even be a lunch time credit futures market for people who occasionally work from home or on business trips?

How can you be trusted to manage bond traders if you can't even properly manage a cafeteria?

Gattaca, not Gattica. A, G, C, and T.

As others have noted, this isn't efficient at all. They've incentivized some of the highest-paid (ie. most expensive) employees in all of business to waste their most valuable resource - time - in pursuit of a token savings.

The folks at GS are extremely smart people, which leads me to believe that this isn't unintentional at all. Instead of achieving actual savings, they have:

* An effective PR stunt. * A low-cost signaling mechanism for employees to show their dedication to Goldman's "cultural values"

Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with "capital efficiency" and everything to do with "image"

One concern I have here is I know my productivity is impacted when I'm hungry. It's quite possible this is optimizing for time-at-desk at expense of worker productivity.

A lot of people are mentioning the idea that this should actually be a continuous curve... As someone who has used the cafeteria for a couple months, I would say this is most likely an over optimization. You are creating a complication for every transaction, and making it so now there is now set points where you can save the most money, namely at the beginning/end of the window. Which actually creates more of the two 'two hump system' swombat, saalweachter, smickie and others have mentioned. Just like there is a natural gradient to lunch from 12 to 1, you still get a gradient in the discounted hours. 11:30 isn't a better time to eat lunch then 11:55, It's simply an attempt to split up lunch times so that the cafeteria can effectively have 3 rush hour instead of 1. And since traffic effects aren't linear, you get a much quicker overall experience as a result. "The people standing around" is overplayed, Those are the people's elevator rides who were are little shorter/longer than expected.

They should use entry tickets, valid at a specific time and date. Sold at auction. With a second hand market for when you change your mind.

"Creepy" would be if they had people test blood sugar levels and only admit them into the cafeteria when their blood sugar starts dropping too much.

This is just mildly interesting. It's not like differentiated pricing for peak periods if particularly unusual, though admittedly I haven't seen it at a cafeteria.

> Goldman beat estimates but many analysts say a driver of this was Goldman's ability to cut costs

If they ever cut costs somewhere, it's from the pockets of their clients.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/aug/01/fabulous-fab...

Am I a commie if I think Goldman Sachs is a bit creepy in itself?

So is there a derivatives market for the food purchased at a discount? Seems like an opportunity for arbitrage. Corner the market on meatloaf!!!

I refuse to read an article that cannot even get its Sci-Fi references straight.

As usual a technological solution would have saved more money. All Goldman would have to do is let people reserve their place in the lunch line through their cellphone or at their desk. When their number comes up, they can go right to the front of the line and order. There would be a specific physical way to access the front of the line when your number is up.

The people who don't use this policy would quickly learn to use it since the others would be constantly skipping them. So that would push everyone to use this system and avoid the physical line. The system could even show them estimated time remaining via an app or webpage.

For that matter, Goldman could have its own app for its employees. So can many other organizations. Lots of government inefficiency comes from this. The NY DMV finally put forms up online!! Imagine how much more efficient it is to fill out a form online than waste half a day standing on line (not online) to get the right form, then fill it out and wait for your # to come up to finally do something.

By the way, if you liked the above idea of organizations making apps for their employees, reach out to me through http://qbix.com/about . We spent about two years building the technology for making such apps for organizations. We could really use someone with good PR or Marketing experience to partner with us though. And developers are always welcome (if you use Node or PHP.)