Corporations love to cry poverty when employees ask for a pay raise or even a full hour for lunch. But somehow they keep coming up with the cash to do useless bullshit framed as morale-boosters, despite the fact that we'd all rather just have the money. But why would they give workers a bonus when they can just give them stuff like ...

5 "Gifts" Or "Prizes" In The Form Of Company Swag

You know that time off you get when you can forget about it all? The times when you're not only free from physically going to work, but also free from your work email and calls and Slack? That's a nice four hours a year. Well, your bosses would really love it if you could keep the company in mind during your desperate vacation, maybe by wrapping your beer in a koozie with their shitty logo on it, or adding a logo-shaped trinket to your keychain, so that not even getting into your car provides an escape.

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Companies love their swag, for reasons no one is quite sure of. A logo-embossed water bottle at Christmas, a T-shirt to celebrate some goal or other that you had nothing to do with. I can't tell you the amount of swag I've received over my near-decade of office work, but I can tell you exactly how much of it didn't end up in a landfill: fucking zero.

This is one of those ideas that you know the leadership team gets super excited about, thanks purely to having zero feedback about it from outside their bubble. They're so confident that the cheap plastic shit they'll be putting on every employee's desk as a token of appreciation will be received like airdropped Salisbury steak to the frozen, battered soldiers in Foy at the Battle of the Bulge.