A.S. COUNCIL — Cleveland Thomas, the Grove Caffe’s new
external manager, has the following timeline: If he cannot show financial
progress to the A.S. Council by the end of this year, then his job — and the
Grove itself — are likely to be terminated. With that kind of motivation and
the year halfway over, the cafe should be making significant strides toward
becoming self-supporting, or at least working out of its five-figure deficit.
But the truth is in the numbers, and the Grove’s deficit has nearly tripled —
from about $24,000 to about $67,000 — under Thomas’ watch.
According to A.S. Associate Vice President of Enterprise
Operations Chelsea Maxwell, much of the increase comes from anticipated
start-up expenses, and was spent during October and November. Costs included
making sure that nothing in or around the cafe violated code and schoolwide
marketing expenses. But the Grove continued to struggle even after a $34,000
start-up push. The deficit increased by roughly $6,000 between December and
January with an insignificant — literally, about $12 — income increase between
the two months.
“Beginning in December and continuing through January,”
Maxwell said, “the Grove did well given that it has extremely limited access
and the campus was closed for a couple of weeks.”
What? If an additional six grand of student-fee support per
month is considered a success, clearly Maxwell, and Grove workers, needs a
swift reality check. Rather than bring the cafe any hope of financial
stability, Thomas has pushed it farther into the hole — if the Grove continues
losing money at the rate of $6,000 a month for the rest of the year, it will
amass more debt in five months than it had in the past five years without any
consistent management.
Thomas and Maxwell have expectedly spit out weak excuses:
There are a lot of start-up costs. The
business.
Forget for a moment that the Grove isn’t new — so no actual
“start-up” took place — and that Thomas knew about the construction when he was
hired and should have planned accordingly. The fact of the matter remains:
Neither Thomas nor Maxwell has any plan of how to improve sales — their very
responses to the question reveal how gloomy the Grove’s future really is.
“My plans for pulling the Grove out of debt is to continue
making a reasonable profit over time to pay down a debt that I inherited,”
Thomas said.
Brilliant plan — if it reconciled with reality. The Grove
has no base from which to build even with Thomas’ supervision, and has instead
fallen deeper than ever into debt. And where is that money coming from?
Students’ pockets.
Last year, when the Grove’s debt first made headlines, then
co-owner Ron Carlson decided wisely to cut his losses, making the A.S. Council
fully responsible for the cafe’s fate. And while Thomas claims he will bring
the cafe out of debt without dipping into student fees, this looks to be just
another example of how out of touch he is.
“No activity fee funds are being used to offset the Grove’s
debt or operational cost,” he said. “The debt will be retired through solid
management of the Grove’s operations and finances, both of which I was hired to
do.”
So it looks like solid management means running the cafe
into the ground. To bring the Grove out of debt, Thomas began offering products
that the cafe’s
neighbors already provide. This doesn’t make sense at all — why would an A.S.
enterprise want to duplicate the products of nearby student-run shops? But
perhaps the most outrageous of Thomas’ new flubs is buying tons of salads,
which don’t sell and end up being given away. Thomas should have been brought
in as an efficiency manager, to streamline the cafe’s costs and expenses. The
last thing the Grove needs is to waste more money.
“I think that the marginal cost of rotating out stale food
for fresh food and providing enough food options for our consumers is better
than running out of food,” the coffee-shop manager said. “The average small
business allocates 1 to 3 percent of its revenue to waste.”
But what Thomas forgets is that the average small business
isn’t given a blank check from the Bank of UCSD Undergraduates to do with what
it will.
Maxwell anticipates that “as the old
continues to expand its menu and catering, it will soon begin to work its way
out of debt.” But as long as the Grove remains in an ever-increasing deficit,
it will continue to be a drain on student fees — money that could be put to
better use elsewhere.
The A.S. Council needs to get its act together and think
very seriously about how much patience the Grove deserves. For no matter how
loud and passionate its supporters, they are blatantly few.
It’s not the function of A.S. Enterprises to waste student
funds on resources people clearly don’t use and it’s not the responsibility of
22,000 undergrads to finance an unpopular coffee shop.
