[2062] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: [Mit-talk] [UA-SCATR] New Card initiative
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Finin)
Mon Jul 10 13:05:43 2006
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 13:05:15 -0400
From: "Peter Finin" <pfinin@alum.mit.edu>
To: mit-talk@mit.edu
Errors-To: mit-talk-bounces@mit.edu
Jeff Roberts said:
> I only have to observe that the argument for having a more
> market-driven type of food service system, that operates without any
> subsidy or mandatory up-front payment, is a very thoughtful and
> reasonable one, in theory. Unfortunately, no provider has been able
> to make it work -- or perhaps has never really been willing to try. I
> think that students who are interested enough in this (not you and me,
> Jacob, unfortunately we're too old for this) need to ask the right
> questions in order to figure out why.
I'm unclear as to exactly how the relationship between the food
trucks and MIT works. However, when I was at MIT from 1997 through
2001, I felt like the food trucks were by far the best places to eat
on campus, possibly followed by LaVerdes for sandwiches. Having then
gone on to work at UPenn for several years, I again noted that the
best, cheapest, fastest, and most diverse food options were based on
the numberous food carts and trucks that proliferate in West Philly.
One advantage Penn had here was both a much larger number of trucks
and carts, and better hours - many of them are open until 8 or 9 at
night, making them viable dinner options.
I think this is pretty clearly directly attributable to the trucks
being the least intitutional, least managed, most numerous, and thus
by definition most competitive options. They're absolutely market
driven, I'm quite certain they recieve no subsidy, and I think they
generally operate almost entirely independently of the institute. I
feel like any solution MIT tries to engineer from the top down is
pretty much doomed to be shitty in comparison to just opening things
up for a bunch more trucks to come park all over the place.
-Peter
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