Imagine waking up 40 minutes late on a Wednesday after hitting the snooze button one time too many and darting to the bathroom to get ready for your 9:00 a.m. class only to find that your pesky, “always-squeezes-the-tube-from-the-middle” roommate finished what was left of your toothpaste.
Normally you would just sprint to the C-Store and grab a new roll of toothpaste. However, as of this semester, the C-Store opens at noon every day. So what’s a student in a bind left to do?
It doesn’t seem rational from the student’s point-of-view to delay the store’s opening until 12 p.m. After the millions of dollars the school has grossed over the past several years from their expensive tuition, one may think they could afford to have the lights on for another few additional hours and pay some lucky sophomore the seven dollars and fifty cents an hour in work-study money so they can keep the store operating through the morning.
Unfortunately, with the recent closure of Thriftway Pharmacy, students now rely more heavily on the C-Store as a nearby source for quick purchases and various food options.
Due to these new circumstances and the shortened C-Store hours, it’s hard to pick up a drink before that early morning class or stop in for that emergency toiletry.
Initially, you might not see the C-store opening up at 12 as a big deal, but if you do a good 10-15 minutes of observational research you would be outraged to find that most other big institutions such as Penn State University and the University of Miami have on-campus resources that run 24 hours for their students’ daily needs.
With St. John’s pushing their resident image and well over three thousand kids currently living on campus, wouldn’t that be a rational reason to maintain the morning C-Store hours?
In order for students to accept this decision, they must be formally presented with a clear and thorough explanation of why it was made. There is no reason why a school that has enough capital to build a new University Center and renovate Carnesecca Arena can’t keep the Hungry Johnnie C-Store open with longer hours.
While the need to save money in this recession economy is important, pinching pennies at the expense of the C-Store seems unnecessary. The situation becomes even more baffling when you see other Montgoris employees at work early in the morning, yet the seat behind the C-Store’s cashier
remains vacant.
Simply put, the importance of having the resource of a convenience store at convenient hours outweighs any reason for limiting its hours. A small shop of the C-Store’s size is not only easy to keep open an extra three hours in the morning, the task is also fairly miniature in comparison to the operation of Montgoris or the Library cafe – both of which seem to have little problem operating with early hours.
After all, what good is a convenience store in the first place if it fails to live up to its name? It’s imperative that management realizes the issue with cutting C-Store hours and that the significance of student convenience is not overlooked.
Those students who don’t see the implications of the C-Store’s new hours have to look at the situation in a broader spectrum and just imagine what’s next.
Students paying good money to live at a university should be well within their rights to purchase gummy bears for breakfast.
