Mayor Ed Lee may not understand the Google bus protests, but other technology companies certainly grokked that the shuttles are an easy target to leverage for attention! Witness this warming station set up near the corner of Van Ness and Union this morning, serving free coffee and sandwiches to folks waiting for their corporate shuttle ride (as well as at two other stops). This free-as-in-coffee-as-a-service was brought to you by BigCommerce, makers of “eCommerce & Shopping Cart Solutions.” Flyers distributed along with the coffee declared “You’ve been #poached!” in a nod to continued revelations of Silicon Valley’s wage fixing scandal.

Of course, they’re mostly just looking for engineers for their SF office, where there’s plenty more to offer in the “Fully stocked kitchen with breakfast, snacks, kegs, etc.” But hey, the Austin office is where the sales, marketing and biz dev team plays foosball together, and presumably they are just crushing it!

In completely unrelated news, French economist Thomas Piketty argues in his “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” that, contrary to Simon Kuznets, wealth in market economies ultimately concentrates, suggesting perpetually expanding income inequality is the effective outcome of capitalism, not a historical anomoly. Something to read on your iPad while you’re sipping free coffee and waiting for the shuttle, maybe!

[Photos: Matt Graves]