As the fall semester comes to a close, many students may be left wondering why there has been a continued absence of the mobile ordering application Boost on campus.
A Sept. 20 article from The Equinox reported KSC Dining hoped to have Boost back up and running within a week and a half of the article’s publication; however, continued staffing shortages have prevented that from happening, according to KSC Director of Dining Operations Bonnie Blanchard.
Blanchard said the plan now is to reopen We Proudly Serve Starbucks on the Boost app by the beginning of the spring semester, but said there are challenges when it comes to reopening 603 Burger on the app. “We have made a commitment to ourselves, and I’m making a commitment right now that we’ll have Starbucks up and running on Boost when we return in January. It will go back to how it was prior, which was [that] you could only order Starbucks on Boost,” she explained.
Blanchard said handling both walk-up orders and Boost orders would be problematic, especially with a smaller staff. “It sort of comes down to, ‘Who do you wait on first?,’ the person who’s already put their order in on Boost and is expecting to pick it up … or to the person who is standing right in front of you,” she said.
The size of the space is also an issue, Blanchard said. Even with adequate staffing levels, “We don’t have the capacity to do both, I mean just size-wise … We can only fit three people back there and that’s kind of crowding it,” she explained.
In the 2022-2023 academic year, when Boost ordering was available for 603 Burger, students were able to pick up their mobile orders at the space that previously housed The Paper Lantern, but now the dining team is questioning the utilization of that space.
“Ideally, it would be great to have Burger 603 as it is now … and then having something behind, out in the kitchen, where we could actually process all the Boost orders and have them have two separate areas,” she said.
While students may have been seeing new faces working in the Lloyd’s Marketplace space, Blanchard explained there is still uncertainty regarding maintaining current staff, especially over winter break.
“We still are struggling to hire a lot of folks, you know an unknown that we don’t have right now is a lot of times [when] we go on break … we have some people who go out and, because they need to have a paycheck each weekend, they’ll find another job.
Our hope is that everyone comes back to us when we come back in January, but that we don’t know,” she said.
Blanchard mentioned that some of the newer employees are temp workers, who are hired for a predetermined amount of time to meet the staffing needs of a company. She said there have been about 15 new hires in recent months due to the efforts of a talent acquisition team utilizing different means of recruitment.
“We get on every week with them to go over what strategies are working for us, what aren’t, here’s some new ones to try … They’ve helped us a lot but it’s a tough labor pool out there.”
Blanchard said the methods of recruitment have ranged from job postings on Indeed, an employment website, to cold-calling local residents in search of a job.
“Right now our highest priorities [in hiring] are cooks and dishwashers,” she said.
Regardless of what happens in the coming months, Blanchard said any reopening of Boost has to be long-lasting and consistent.
“What we don’t want to do is open for a week and a half, or two weeks, and then say, ‘Oh darn, this isn’t working,’ and then have to shut it down again. When we open it, we want to make sure that we’re opening it, and we’re opening it right,” Blanchard explained.
Nathan Hope can be contacted at
nhope@kscequinox.com
“We have made a commitment to ourselves, and I’m making a commitment right now that we’ll have Starbucks up and running on Boost when we return in January. It will go back to how it was prior, which was [that] you could only order Starbucks on Boost.”
BONNIE BLANCHARD KSC DIRECTOR OF DINING OPERATIONS
