Housing & Dining has thrown up some cheap-looking plastic signage around the Empti Lounge vending machines that reads “Market Central.” How exactly a few standard vending machines qualifies as a “market” Bwog has yet to understand, but one thing we do know is that nothing says classy like fake plastic torchieres.
According to culinary anthropologist Jonathan Hill, “the vending machines are caught in some kind of arms race of gaudiness. For years, the drink/snack machines were the only game in town; then the hot dog machine rolled into the neighborhood and destabilized the balance of tacky, so the drink/snack machine bloc responded by tarting itself up with plastic frippery. Now it’s the hot dog machine’s move, and I’m betting it’s going to be BIG.”
Though the administration’s next upgrade to the glorified meat locker remains to be announced, Bwog suspects that they might just be ready to plug the machine in. Baby steps, H&D – baby steps.
11 Comments
@... whatever. i want to see a hi-res photograph of a mechanically prepared hot dog. is that really so much to ask?
@haha laughed out loud
@it's birmingham, actually jesus christ, tone down the self-righteousness. i was talking about the setup’s aesthetic cheapness and linguistic phoniness. both sadly dominate the suburban AESTHETIC. i don’t care about anything being ‘urban’, and i don’t think that someone handing me a coke as opposed to getting it from a machine has anything to do with the ‘urbanness’ of the university anyway (though i do think that the quality and selection of food options should be a lot better for the money they expect us to shell out). this vending machine is symptomatic of the larger problem of the university’s penny-pinching. it’s tragic that they are by and large choosing to build and renovate cheaply and hideously (like they do in the suburbs) instead of investing in properly maintaining and adding to this rare gem of a campus.
@dear sir don’t feed the trolls.
love,
mgmt
(not the band)
@madam i know the diff b/w a troll and self-righteous ignorance. this was the latter.
@@clg quit being so…. supercilious
bada bing!
@clg the suburban retrofitting of columbia: almost complete!
@clearly from Iowa Oh really? I guess if they paid an immigrant worker illegal wages to hand out Cokes for 1.50 it’d be more “urban” or “authentic” or whatever bullshit anti-fantasy you want this school to be. It’s a damn vending machine, we’re a long way from Costco (not that it’d be a bad thing).
@IMDB GOOFS Revealing Mistakes: The throngs of people pushing past each other to use these vending machines have clearly been photoshopped out.
Miscellaneous: The vending machines appear to have eyebrows.
@lol that is all
@Scrappple I bet they’ll fill that hot dog machine with those foul franks that you get at the baseball games on “Dollar Dog Nights.” Oink.