Office work is demanding work. The commute is awful, the hours are uninteresting as hell, and the coffee, if you’re lucky enough to get it, is generally awful. It’s enough to make an employee want to revolt, or at least run to the nearest wooded area to completely degenerate and never come back.
And at Tesla’s factory, workers are taking back the power. Or at least the coffee cups. So many coffee cups. 65,000 coffee cups have apparently disappeared from one Tesla factory.
As reported Car bladesTesla’s Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg in Grünheide has had a abrasive go of it since it opened in 2022. Residents have raised concerns about the facility due to its potential environmental damage. In March, a suspected arson attack left the plant without power for a day, costing the company an estimated $1 billion. Internally, things aren’t looking much better. Tesla recently laid off about 2% of the plant’s 12,000 workers, and the union representing the plant’s workers says they are “under extreme pressure and increasingly frustrated by safety issues” and isn’t ruling out a strike. Car Scoops reports that the plant has reported three times as many emergencies as Audi’s plant in Ingolstadt.
Now, the cups. Plant manager Andrew Thierig says that 65,000 coffee cups have been purchased in the gigafactory’s two years. And they’re all gone. “I’ll just give you a number,” Thierig told a staff meeting. “We’ve purchased 65,000 coffee cups since we started production here. 65,000! Statistically, every one of you has five Ikea coffee cups in your home. I’m really tired of approving orders to buy more coffee cups.”
Five cups per employee. That’s one per finger for the ancient five-finger discount. And that’s a lot of cups. In dollars, it’s perhaps less astonishing. You can buy a coffee cup for $0.99 at Ikea (and that’s not a bulk purchase). Spending $65,000 over two years on 12,000 employees works out to an extra $2.50 per employee per year. And given that the factory generates $1 billion per day, maybe an extra $2.50 per year to keep employees ecstatic and caffeinated is just a drop in the bucket.
And honestly, we don’t know if it’s employees who are lifting the cups. I mean, Tesla’s CEO has a penchant for tossing coffee makers, so maybe we should start by looking at this guy?
