Opinion: From Where I Sit – Why the Kiosks in the Café Metro Need To Be Fixed…Food for Thought

While classes and professors change semester-to-semester, students on the Penn State Greater Allegheny (PSUGA) Campus are used to one consistency during their time on campus: the Café Metro in the Student Community Center (SCC). However, the Spring 2023 semester brought a new upgrade to the Café: two new kiosks where you order your food.

This new system imitates those used by gas stations like Sheetz or Wawa. Students who want to buy food go to a kiosk, order what food item they want, go to the counter to pick up their food, and then check out. That is how, at least to my understanding, the system is supposed to work.

Unfortunately, like many innovations added to an existing system, there are some complications.

To begin, many of the food options that are available to purchase are not displayed on the kiosks. While this may seem like a minor inconvenience since most students can simply go to the counter and ask for the food item they want, there is more to this minor issue than it seems. Because the staff is now focused on making the food that is ordered from the kiosks, it becomes problematic for students who simply want to just ask for their food item.

In my personal experience, it seems rude to interrupt staff members while they are serving someone else. As such, I will wait longer than necessary so that a staff member is not busy. I believe that other students feel similarly. A quick and easy solution for this issue is to add all food options for the day to the kiosk (except for food items that students can grab for themselves, such as pizza).

Another issue that I see with the current system is that students pay after grabbing their food instead of paying before. This does not follow the current formats set out by Made-To-Order gas stations like Sheetz or Wawa. This seems inconvenient because students may want to buy a drink or something else and must wait for their other items instead of being able to buy and consume what they’ve bought while waiting for their food to be made.

A simple remedy for this is to have students pay before receiving their food.

Finally, there is an inconsistency in which foods receive calorie counts and which do not. This is important since many students on campus are also athletes or are otherwise health conscious. Because of this, it may limit what foods students want to buy because they may be concerned about calories.

Also, when it comes to foods that students can have customized, such as subs or sandwiches, it does not calculate the total calories for a customized food item. The solution for this is to simply add calorie numbers for all food items and all the different options available.

Overall, I believe that a few corrections to the current system can make the online method of buying food at the Café Metro more convenient for students and, frankly, anyone eating at the Café Metro.

I also believe that these changes can make things more efficient for the staff, too. I hope management will take these recommendations seriously.

What do you think?

Story by: Zach Petrulak (zkp5066@psu.edu)