Students wait in line to pick up their meals from the new lockers at Mirror Lake Eatery on Friday. Credit: Daniel Bush | Campus Photo Editor
This semester, students will now pick up their food in lockers at various cafes and markets on campus.
In previous years, students would receive a number for their order and wait around for their food to be ready. Then, they would go up to the counter to grab their meals or ask an employee to hand them their order.
Now, students can pick up their food in new lockers, designed to only allow a person with a specific code to access their items.
Multiple university dining options such as Mirror Lake Eatery, Woody’s Tavern, Union Market, Marketplace on Neil, 12th Ave Bread Co. and Juice at RPAC have all shifted to this new model.
Dave Isaacs, university spokesperson, said with the new lockers, students receive a QR code and an optional six-digit code that they can scan at the locker pick-up when their order is ready. Once the scan is complete, the locker opens and they can retrieve their order.
“We have the six-digit code because, let’s say, you send a friend to pick up your food, they can open it with the numbers even if they do not have the QR code,” Isaacs said.
Isaacs said that dining services have had issues in the past where people unintentionally, or intentionally, pick up the wrong food order. The lockers are an attempt to try to avoid these situations, since they want to make it as “seamless an experience as possible.”
Isaacs said that Ohio State is not the first campus that uses this system. Dining services researched what other colleges were doing to smoothly initiate this process.
Isaacs also said they acknowledge the learning curve that comes along with a new system.
“We know there have been experiences where there have been longer lines at the lockers, but we believe that the situation will go away as students learn how to use the lockers,” he said.
Students have expressed mixed emotions about this change.
Neha Bhatnagar, a third-year in mechanical engineering, said even though she lives off campus, the lockers are slightly inconvenient.
Bhatnagar said students only have 10 minutes to pick up their food with the new system before it gets taken out of the locker.
“That is the message they put up [on the Grubhub app], that it’s going to get canceled,” Bhatnagar said. “I don’t usually make them wait 30 minutes, but what if I get caught up with something?”
Other students have expressed the benefit of the new system.
“I think they are helpful, because last year I would notice people would take the wrong orders or steal them,” Janie Johnson, a second-year in animal sciences, said. “I think it’s pretty nice and they’re easy to use.”
Johnson said she thinks it is better than the old system in some ways and students will grow to get used to them.
Gracey Wilkins, a second-year in nursing, said that she agrees with Johnson, but that the lockers can get a bit annoying depending on how busy the dining locations are.
“I think for now they have them in all the places they need to have them,” Wilkins said. “If other places don’t have them right now I think it’s okay.”
Isaacs said they are monitoring the usage and will review the data and the experiences so we are getting the most out of the new lockers.
Overall, Isaacs said their main goal is to “make the guest experience as good as it can be.”
