It’s because a huge amount of business is centered around made up things for going to work.

Things you need to work in an office: suits, dry cleaning for the suits, dress shoes, a car (because public transportation is woefully inadequate for this reason), gas for the car, maintenance for the car, lunch, daycare, a dog walker, you have less time so you are more likely to eat out for dinner, also more likely to hire maids, you are stuck in a commute and radio is awful, so a music subscription, maybe a new phone, and might have to go out for drinks with the coworkers on the way home.

Staying at home, and much of the country on highly limited income, taught us how much we spend on the “privilege” of work. Everyone is still shocked at the emotional and opportunity cost work had, we’re just starting to realize that most of what it sold to us either isn’t real or isn’t needed.

If people don’t go back to work a sea of businesses will fail.

This isn’t me just saying stuff.

https://www.payscale.com/research-and-insights/employee-turnover-pay-raises/

The long and short of this is that getting a raise doesn’t stop someone from looking for a new job or increase satisfaction with the company. Worse, if you ask for, say $10 more and hour and they give you $8 you are less happy than if you get no raise.

Paying people well is important, and people say it’s a primary motivator, but it isn’t as important as they think. Bad bosses, bad work environments and unsatisfying work are bigger factors than pay raises.

but in the context of this post, let’s not be ridiculous

It says a pay raise, not new pay bracket. A 10% raise is substantial, and likely not enough to keep someone. The number one reason people leave a job is their direct supervisor.

To be absolutely clear a ping pong table won’t make you stay with a job. A work place that’s more relaxed and a boss that doesn’t yell at you for taking 5? Maybe a workplace where you enjoy spending time with your coworkers? That’ll do it. The idea is HR can to help nudge towards type of change It doesn’t work and is stupid, but that’s the thinking.

And there are times a small raise will keep an employee, there are times more responsibilities will keep an employee. This is a poor question in general.

Think of the last job you quit. Would a 5% raise change anything?

A ping pong table is an asinine thing to give, but the point of “more money doesn’t make you stay” has been proven by many studies.

When you quit a job because it doesn’t pay enough it’s not a matter of a small raise, it’s a normally a big jump in pay. Until you get to substantial raises, like 10-20k a year, you aren’t really worried about the pay as much as your direct supervisor and the work load. A bump from 60k a year to 61k a year won’t make you stay in a job you hate. 60k to 100k might, but that’s not just a raise, that’s a different class of pay.

I use a pixel and I have a hard time justifying a different phone.

Maybe things have changed but the last Samsung I had was an S7 and I didn’t like it. It suffered from bloat and didn’t last all that long. Battery issues and the screen started to lose sensitivity.

I’ve used iphones and they aren’t bad, but I really dislike apple’s app store and effort to control everything on my phone. Also everytime a new phone came out my old phone became next to unusable for a month.

I got a pixel 3 and loved it, now I have a pixel 6 and don’t see changing my phone any time soon or going to a non-pixel phone. They last a long time, they work well with everything and the camera is excellent.