Employee discounts: Good deals or not?

An article on cnn.money.com talks about how companies use various discounts to keep talented employees. Google and Starbucks use some cool ones — free bean coffee and free lunches, respectively. The article is here:

Imagine: Employee Discounts on Everything

Starbucks’ and Google’s benefits are no monetary cost to the employees. But what about the ones that are merely discounts? Are they good enough discounts to be called a benefit?

Granted, it’s still better than nothing, but if it’s a small enough discount on the company’s goods so that the company still profits by the employee’s purchases, is that really a benefit? Or just the company making money off of its workers?

If it’s called just an “employee discount” then that’s fine, but it ceases to be a “benefit” if the company profits by the employees exercising the “benefit”.