Bay Area tech and social media companies are engaged in an arms race to see who can offer the most – and most unusual – benefits to employees.

While most Americans would be happy to get a job with health coverage, tech workers are being wooed with napping stations, unlimited vacation, free housekeeping and errand-running, yoga classes, on-site doctors and masseuses, and gourmet cafeterias.

Tech companies “don’t want to hear about health care, 401(k), life insurance. Those are commodity benefits,” says Vincent Antonelli, a senior benefits consultant with Towers Watson.

Social Print Studio of San Francisco is a good example of the modern startup. Along with health care, but no 401(k) yet, it offers unlimited vacation, napping boxes, and a fully equipped jam room where its 20 employees and their friends can record a song or video. There is a wall of exotic taxidermy animals; employees are encouraged, but not required, to choose one that best represents their spirit.

The company, which lets customers print photos off Facebook, Instagram and other social media, once brought in classical musicians to serenade the staff. Another time, it filled a bathtub with beer. Co-founder George Sylvain calls the 6,000-square-foot office “a creative playpen.”

Redwood City’s Evernote, a maker of productivity apps that employs about 330 people, pays a service to clean employees’ houses (excluding windows) and provides catered snacks and lunches, unlimited paid time off, a $1,000 vacation subsidy if an employee takes a week off work, gym membership reimbursement, and a $250-per-month electric vehicle subsidy. This is in addition to medical, dental and vision coverage, life insurance and a 401(k).

In its early days, San Francisco’s Udemy, a marketplace for online courses, took the company on a working vacation or “workation” in Antalya, Turkey. “We did some work but also rented a boat and went out on the Mediterranean Sea,” says Dinesh Thiru, the San Francisco firm’s vice president of marketing.

Eventbrite, also in San Francisco, offers a treadmill desk (max speed 2 miles per hour) and a kitchen stocked with a Vitamix blender, fresh fruit, almond milk, hummus, Greek yogurt, flaxseed and kombucha.

Though billed as perks, many of these benefits help the company as much as they help employees.

Vacation unlimited?

Take unlimited vacation, a startup staple in the Bay Area.

Companies are not required to offer paid vacation, but if they do, it becomes a liability. In most states, companies can require employees to take vacation within a certain period or forfeit it.

California, however, does not permit use-it-or-lose it policies; paid vacation is treated like wages. Companies can limit how many vacation hours an employee can accumulate, but when an employee departs, all accrued vacation must be paid out.

“At startups, if people have paid time off and are working a ton and the company gets acquired, that is a bunch of money that has to be paid out,” says Brian Helmick, founder of Algentis, which handles human resources for tech companies.

But if a company offers unlimited vacation, it could really mean no vacation.

Such policies “benefit employees in that they are not limited to what they have accrued. It benefits employers in that when employees depart there is not a big payout obligation,” says Felicia Reid, an employment lawyer at Hirschfeld Kraemer.

This theory, however, has never been tested in California courts. Employees who were promised unlimited vacation but never took any potentially could argue they are entitled to something, says Erika Frank, general counsel with the California Chamber of Commerce.

In the Bay Area, 60 to 80 percent of startups offer unlimited vacation, Helmick says. Most companies that offer it don’t know how much vacation employees actually take because they don’t track it.

Automattic, the San Francisco company behind WordPress.com, is one of the few that does. It has 209 employees in 30 countries. “We encourage people to take at least five weeks a year,” says Lori McLeese, the firm’s human resources lead. “Europeans take a little bit more. Americans take a little less.”

Netflix stopped tracking employee vacations in 2004. With about 2,200 employees, it is one of the largest companies that offers such a policy.

“You can take as much vacation as you like, but if you were to never show up at work, your employment won’t last,” spokesman Joris Evers says. “It’s about freedom and responsibility and treating people like adults.”

Twitter, which has about 2,300 employees, offers unlimited vacation to exempt employees only.

Most large companies don’t offer open-ended unlimited vacation because it puts too much responsibility on managers to police it, Antonelli said.

Free food

Benefits consultant Towers Watson surveyed 20 large tech companies about their perks this year and found that the most popular, and most valued by employees, was free or subsidized meals.

The idea behind free food “is to keep people at work, to have social time and to interact,” says Leslie Caccamese, director of research and marketing with the Great Place to Work Institute, which ranks workplaces. Technology makes it possible to work from home, “but companies realize that great ideas come when people collaborate.”

Crazy perks were common in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s but faded after the dot-com crash.

Then came Google. Flush with cash and needing hordes of people, it offered an enviable lineup of benefits that now includes gourmet food and 22 weeks of paid maternity leave plus $500 in “baby bonding bucks” for new parents.

As people left Google to start new companies, they brought some of those ideas with them. Competing companies had to up their ante too, Helmick says.

Evernote spokeswoman Ronda Scott says her company is not using its unique benefits to lure workers. “It’s about giving people the tools to get their jobs done and be most effective at the office,” she says.

At Social Print Studio, the culture was a big draw for Brad Rocheleau, director of special products. At his previous job, with an environmental consulting firm in Washington, D.C., “I was the youngest by over a decade. For me to be fully happy, I had to develop human relationships with people at work. I also wanted to work with more relevant technology.”

For now, such perks are rare outside California. “I guarantee you there are no napping boxes at IBM,” says Peter Cappelli, management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Antonelli, however, says he has “a very non-tech company with an online division in the Bay Area” that is recruiting tech workers and “trying to get this division up to speed” benefits-wise. “We are seeing it bleed into mainstream industries this way.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, says these benefits come and go.

“As soon as there is an economic downturn, all of this stuff will go away in less than a heartbeat,” he says.