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It's interesting the number of company layoffs recently that have listed "you can keep your laptop" as part of the severance package. Is it possible that shipping charges for layoffs of this size plus the overhead and personnel to deal with such numbers of returns is more expensive than just having employees keep them?

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Companies like this drop-ship new laptops to new employees.

The laptops everyone has are COVID-era and about to expire for warranty, and would just be binned anyway. So there is no point taking them back.

Most companies, especially remote first ones like Gitlab, don’t have sizable IT departments that could deal with receiving, cleaning, reformatting, and deploying hundreds of laptops anyway. Can you imagine the poor technician who gets 150 laptops FedEx'ed to his house? The company is paying tens of thousands in severance costs per employee, way easier to just add the mostly-depreciated laptop onto that figure than deal with the logistics.

This was kind of my point though. It's a really net-benefit to the company but couched as a severance benefit to the individual being laid off.

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