[media-credit name=”Lisa Xia / Student Publications” align=”aligncenter” width=”711″]
[/media-credit]Despite the reinstatement of 24-hour service and hot breakfast at North Avenue Dining Hall (NADH) earlier this semester, student traffic between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. at NADH remains weak.
“We are seeing a little more activity from the 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. time period, but after 3 a.m., there are many 30-minute windows where there are no students coming in,” said Dori Martin, marketing director for Dining. “We have a facility open, food out, staff present and no customers.”
This poses a challenge for the longevity of 24-hour service at the location. During most business hours, an average of 30 people enter NADH every 15 minutes. However, between the hours of 2 a.m. to 7 a.m., fewer than five students enter the facility during each 15-minute interval.
“We want to be sustainable as well and utilize our resources and put them where people are actually using them,” said Staci Flores, general manager for Dining.
The reinstatement has been prolonged to the end of this semester as sort of goodwill to the community, according to Martin.
“Reinstating is not a permanent decision, in the sense that the numbers aren’t speaking to what the students want,” said Eran Mordel, SGA Vice President of Campus Affairs. “The administrators will look at this again.”
At the beginning of this semester, Dining removed hot breakfast from the menu at NADH and cut its hours between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. This provoked a reaction from students who felt that they were no longer receiving the services they had paid for at the beginning of the year.
“We didn’t have enough time to communicate it properly because of that December break,” Flores said. “We wanted to open back up and be transparent and communicate to students saying, ‘There is low participation and for us to continue this program that everybody says they would like, we need you to use it.’”
According to Dining, the closure of the aforementioned services at NADH allowed them to reallocate resources to other projects and services.
“When we did close during that time period, all of that food that was under-utilized was food dollars that we could put towards the lunch and dinner programs,” Martin said. “So, you were seeing a lot more interesting, creative and more proteins, on the menu because we are better able to afford those things when we better utilize our food dollars.”
The closure allowed for efficient allocation of staffing time.
“We also redistributed labor at Brittain and NADH so they opened up an additional breakfast line,” Flores said.
Following the outcry, Dining agreed to reinstate the cancelled services at NADH. The data that Dining acquires this semester will be made available to students before any changes are made regarding future service offerings.
“What we’re doing at North Ave. every week is letting students know, on our plasma screens in fact, ‘Hey look, this is how much the participation was each day from a four-hour time period at North Avenue’ and kind of inviting them,” Martin said.
Individual components of the plan, however, were attacked.
“Regarding hot breakfast, it needs to be consistent,” Mordel said. “If they are providing it at Brittain and Woodruff, then this option need to be consistent across the board too. No qualms there.”