Benson still faces blunders, but improvements leave hope

By Nico Weiss

It truly doesn't matter how sleek and futuristic a phone looks; if it can't make calls, then it is useless. Yes, I am talking to you, Apple.

In this way, the changes to Benson are just like the new iPhone-they have a few good ideas, it looks hyper-sexy, but in the end the product is just an over-priced piece of jewelry that, so far, doesn't work when you actually try to use it.

Throughout my previous three years of school here I have had a sneaking suspicion that our school forgets they are in the service industry.

With nearly every change they make to our campus - be it remodeling Cellar Market, closing the gate across from Domicilio, or the most recent changes to Benson and Swig - they spend far too much focus on making the project pretty instead of functional.

The new Benson eatery seems as though it was made with one thing in mind: theft prevention. But even without students taking food, a crime is still being committed.

Because the food at Benson still costs roughly twice that of market value, our money is being stolen.

The new design also steals something much more precious: our time.

By building in such a way that restricts customers instead of better serving them, the school has made a basic mistake in forgetting who they are supposed to serve.

Admittedly, a lot of the hiccups were worked out over this first two weeks of usage. I'm glad to see that they've placed water jugs in the dining area so that we don't need to wait in line for refills on water, and it was also a good idea to finally train the workers on how the new system works.

But there are still several errors that need to be addressed.

Here are just a few ways in which the school is failing us and wasting our time:

1) By making us place orders with cashiers before we get our food, they have added a step to the process that makes errors more likely, as our orders are now like a game of telephone between us and the cooks

2) By putting in that fancy moving-wall for collecting trays, they have caused us to bottleneck into a dead end, and constantly overflow compost buckets

3) By opening up the space but using small tables, they have managed to make Benson appear larger and at the same time give us almost no place to sit at one table with large groups of friends.

Additionally, though unrelated to efficiency, it is annoying that they tore out the old Benson TVs to give us fewer, more expensive ones. I imagine that the old ones were on the wrong channel or something.

Fabio Soto, the general Manager of Bon Apetit at Santa Clara, maintains that "week one is a rough week; at any campus I have ever worked week one is a tough week."

Therefore the service should improve as students and staff alike get more accustomed to the new set-up to Benson.

Soto adds that Bon Apetit has "already seen some great improvements, the lines have died down and [Benson is] much more efficient in every area."

I no longer pop over to Benson between classes because the line to place my order alone will take 15 minutes. Friends of mine have actually chosen to go hungry instead of facing Benson's lines. These will ultimately hurt sales and the schools bottom line.

If the efficiency does not improve, the school won't just feel the millions wasted on the renovation itself, but also the thousands in lost profits from disgruntled students giving up on the spot. I hope that offsets the cost of your stolen forks.

Nico Weiss is a senior philosophy and psychology double major.