Herald blogs: The City Within
Union deficit highlights importance of new Peet’s coffee shop
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It was clear Wisconsin Union officials were worried about financial losses when they decided to bring a Union-licensed Peet’s coffee shop into the Memorial Union, as I reported in the Feb. 8 the issue (“Tempest in a coffee cup”). Wisconsin Union Associate Director Hank Walter said a more influential factor, however, was the desire to meet a student need.
The Union administration put an exact number on its anticipated deficit in Wednesday’s “Union proposes budget increase,” blaming the $131,200 revenue deficit expected for 2008-9 primarily on the closing of Union South.
This latest development reiterates the importance of the new coffee shop’s profit-making potential. “We do believe a coffee shop will be successful financially, and we need it to be,” Walter told me at the time. He said the Union receives only 30 percent of its funding from student fees; much of the rest comes from food service.
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How is this helping the students or the Union? They closed a rental generating space, the travel place and the classic vidoe pinball room (after also closing the games room in the basement) to bring in an outside vendor that sells out of state coffee? How is this to bring in money? And why are we and students in the next decade paying for a new union south, when it was their mismangement and lack of upkeep that made the old one a problem in the first place? They presently already have a monopoly and have the only coffee sales on campus at many locations, if they are not now making money at it, hows does paying an outsider to run your operation save money? How does getting coffee roasted out of state and shipped a better product than coffee roasted here freshly in town? Why does the student community