While some possess strong aesthetic opinions of the Usdan University Center’s architectural design, many point out that the building’s very structure can impede its chief purpose: dining. The lay-out of the tray return area, in particular, causes huge, winding lines on a daily basis that often slow down students, many of them anxiously waiting to walk to their 1 p.m. class. This year, even Bon Appétit administrators are publicly owning up to the problem—in addition to voicing their frustration, they are scrambling for solutions to what has become a daily nuisance.
“In theory the system should work fine,” wrote Michael Strumpf, resident district manager of Bon Appétit, in an e-mail. “When you factor in volume of customers returning trays, the timing of customers leaving the dining areas, then factor in the small and—for lack of a better word—’boxed-in’ area for tray return, with one way in and one way out, the results will be congestion.”
Because of the timing of class schedules, most students eat between 12-1 p.m. and 6-7 p.m. Lunchtime brings a particularly concentrated influx of students, with Usdan staff typically helping up to 500 customers within a 20-minute window. Since all 500 students stand in long lines together, many must then return their trays at the same time and hectically rush off to class.
Jim Ferrari, a dish room worker and utility worker in Usdan, has stood at the tray return window to help students navigate the area’s confusing system, which requires students to awkwardly place food in specific bins, sort silverware and then rest their tray at a particular angle, so as to not jam up the conveyor belt.
“The students jostle around and push to put their tray down, but the crazy part is that they have to turn around and go through it [the tray return area] again to exit the area,” Ferrari said.
Having east and west dining rooms also lead to problems with tray disposal, since students enter from both directions in order to access the building’s only tray drop-off location. Joanne Rafferty, the associate director of Operations in Usdan, said that the building’s designers did not intend for all students to converge in the same area.
“In regards to the dish room, I can tell you that it was not in the original plan to have everyone bring their trays to this one area,” she said. “To compensate for the dish return only being in the west dining bay, the east dining bay was to have large rolling carts that folks could put their trays on.”
This plan, however, was marred by inefficiencies—the carts often filled up too quickly and trays were loaded incorrectly. As a result, a dining employee was regularly asked to specifically monitor the state of the carts. By the end of last year, Bon Appétit decided to rid the east dining area of the temporary tray system.
“In the perfect world each dining area would have its own tray return area,” Strumpf wrote. “However, that is not how the area was architecturally designed and it always comes down to form versus function.”
To solve the congestion problem, Ferrari said that Bon Appétit administrators are considering speeding up the conveyor belt at peak hours. Often, the endless lines build up because the conveyor belt only has room for 10 trays at a time: a problem that can often lead to mechanical breakdowns.
“There is not enough room in the design of Usdan for the mechanics of the belt,” Ferrari said. “If it slows down too much, it will jam and stop working completely.”
While the proposal to speed up the belt may ease the strain on students, Ferrari predicts that such a change would also increase the pressure put on dish room employees, who would be required to remove and clean trays at a much faster rate.
Ultimately, Ferrari sees the conveyor belt as a microcosm of a much greater problem within Usdan’s design.
“When designing the building, they did not think about how it would actually operate or how ridiculous it was,” Ferrari said. “Now those burdens of the architectural and mechanical obstacles are placed on the backs of the union workers.”
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