A vibrant part of the New York community, which as a whole spent over 100 million dollars on hot dogs and sausages last year, according to the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council, Columbia students love their prepackaged meats. And, with the advent of the hot dog vending machine in Lerner Hall, this year, they will likely be adding to that total.
The former fourth floor home of Tasti D-Lite’s suspicious “dairy-based soft serve frozen dessert” (as they call it on their Web site) is now home to a distinctly higher-calorie and, in the eyes of some students, more offensive hot dog vending machine.
“On January 14 of this year, that was the Friday before classes were going to start, Tasti just packed up and left,” said Vicki Dunn, Director of Dining.
With ramped-up competition from Pinkberry and other off-campus eateries, some of which accept Flex, Dunn said she thought that the managers had taken “their eye off the ball, and worried too much about their corporate stores.” Their neglect helped contribute to a 70 percent reduction in their profits from the previous semester, allowing them to pull out of their contract at the last second.
Left in the lurch and with a gaping hole in the corner of Ferris Booth Commons, Dining Services needed to quickly fill the space with another food option.
“In all honesty, it’s more there as a convenience, more for a late night snack, than a permanent dining option,” Dunn said, noting that the vending company had given her the idea for the machine.
So why not just bring in another local vendor instead of a somewhat menacing vending machine that dispenses precooked meats which, as advertised, go “from chilled to grilled in one minute”?
“We didn’t want any local investment in that space,” Dunn said. “It seemed unfair knowing full well that they would have to pull out in a year,” referring to a plan to transform both Ferris Booth and JJ’s Place to dining halls by next year. In that case, Dunn said, they will need all the space they can get for seating.
Some students, though, saw Tasti as the perfect meeting place. Sajaa Ahmed, CC ’10 and president of the Panhellenic Council, said in an e-mail that “it was an especially good meeting spot because it usually had open tables unlike the rest of this space-crunched campus.”
She added that now the Panhellenic Council, which previously held recruitment events in the location, “must book another event through the complex and bureaucratic University Event Management Office and spend time thinking about other food vendors that often do not accept student group e-forms.”
As evidenced by the reaction that the machine has gotten since Bwog’s Wednesday post on the subject, many students are horrified at the prospect of a campus hot dog machine.
One comment, posted just two hours after the story went up, claims that it “should go down as one of Columbia Dining’s most epic fails. ever.” Another exclaimed “EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!”
Although the new dining choice has brought some controversy, it will, at the very least, increase competition with the two other dirty water hot dog carts on 114th and 116th Streets. And who knows, maybe by the time the hot dog machine is replaced by new seats for a dining hall, it will be serving filet mignon.
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