Heroes, villains, and smoothies
This is a saga about a smoothie bar. But it is about more than just a smoothie bar. It is about freedom. It is about justice. It has all that a good story needs. It has a hero, of sorts. It definitely has a villain; the big corporate kind. It has theft and betrayal. It has sandwiches, too. Endangered sandwiches.
Our tale begins, as all the best do, with a dream. A dream about a smoothie bar in the head of our hero, an ambitious Matt Burton, YUSU Services and Finance officer. A dream Burton turned into a three-year profit return business plan, a dream that was all-but a reality.
Burton took his proposals to the University authorities – our villains, in case you hadn’t guessed - and was told, in no uncertain terms, to stuff it.
Now here’s where the University gets really villainous. Over the summer, the announcement oozed out from the facilities management lair that there would be - guess what - a brand new smoothie bar in the Roger Kirk centre.
The mind boggles. Is this University so lacking in ideas that it will steal them from the Students’ Union? Of course, their Press department deny that they copied the idea. But… come on. A coincidence? Really?
That’s not all. Burton’s juice bar would have been self-contained and, so the dream went, pay for itself within three years. The University’s proposal, however, involves scaling-down the Roger Kirk Centre’s coffee bar. No more custom baguettes, no more jacket potatoes. I like those baguettes.
There are two issues here. First is the University’s underhand, miserly conduct. They think of nothing but the bottom line.
Here’s the rub; a University cannot be run for profit. Perhaps, with government help, it can break even; but a University’s top priorities should be education and research. Profit should be well down the list, alongside well-kept lawns and adequate parking.
The second issue is this University’s monolithic incompetence. Take Costcutter. YUSU had drawn up proposals for a grocery and general store that would serve the campus; essentially a much larger Your:Shop.
But the University wasn’t having any of it. It opened its own shop and paid through the nose for a Costcutter franchise – a franchise that means that Costcutter makes very little profit at all, and is pretty expensive for students too.
This story does not have a happy ending. The University will get their smoothie bar and unless we make a noise, we will lose our baguettes and jacket potatoes. The smoothie bar will be neither as profitable nor as good as it would be if it was student-run.
It does have a moral, though. Don’t let the University get away with this sort of thing. Rage, rage against the dying of the jacket potatoes. Welcome to York, freshers.
