I read a lot of news stories in the course of a day, and I am often surprised and amused about what I find buried deep down in some of then.

Here’s an example: According to Florida’s St. Petersburg Times, “the new Belgian owners of Anheuser-Busch Cos. announced Monday that Busch Gardens will end a 50-year tradition and stop handing out free beer samples.”

OK, that’s just another corporate cutback at a time when corporate cutbacks are a daily occurrence, but if you read past the Busch Gardens’ visitors bitching about the loss of their free beer, you bump into this little nugget: “Ditched in the same fell swoop with free samples: a longtime monthly perk to full-time park employees of two free cases of Anheuser-Busch beers.”

In the world of benefits, this is a throwback to the 18th and early 19th centuries, when workers got daily alcohol rations as part of their pay. It was an accepted part of many jobs back then—in factories and the military, for example—to get beer or alcohol on the job. It was as accepted then as a free parking space is for many workers today.

What surprises me is not that the free employee beer is being cut at Busch Gardens, but rather, that anyone in America in 2009 would still be getting free alcohol as a perk. And it just goes to show you that there are all sorts of odd and unusual benefits out there. From Google’s free meals to Florida companies offering spiritual and faith-based services to employees, managers and HR executives are dealing with company perks that bring their own unique issues with them.

This also reminds me of the last time I encountered beer as a benefit. It was in Hawaii, of all places. When I moved to Honolulu in the mid-1990s, my neighbors were kind enough to clue me in on an odd but longtime New Year’s tradition: putting out beer for the garbage men.

This was one of those word-of-mouth things, but every New Year’s Day in Honolulu, the garbage workers came by to pick up your trash. Friends and neighbors warned me that you were expected to put out some beer for the garbage guys to both thank them for their hard work and to ensure that your trash got picked up efficiently over the next year. And we were warned that NOT putting out the beer was not really an option. By not observing the tradition, you just made sure that your trash would never, ever be treated kindly again.

No one seemed to know exactly how much beer to put out, but everyone agreed that it needed to be at least a case, and preferably two, in order to accomplish the desired goal.

So, I got up early that first New Year’s Day in Hawaii to see how this was all accomplished. Around 7 a.m., the garbage truck came barreling down the street, as usual, with workers picking up the weekly trash with their usual skill and efficiency. What was different on this particular day, however, was that the garbage truck was followed by a large pickup truck with two guys picking up the cases of beer that had been carefully placed on the curb next to the trash cans.

It was an incredibly efficient operation—and very unlike what you got out of so many public workers in Hawaii. But it did show the power of a timely and focused workplace benefit.

So farewell to the free beer for workers at Tampa’s Busch Gardens. It will surely be a benefit sorely missed and fondly remembered.

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