Yesterday was pretty busy. I ditched Farsi in the morning in favor of sleeping, headed over to my grandparents’ house for Thursday interviews (which didn’t happen — we had lunch and I played the doting grandson extraordinaire (ie, Mac consultant for free)), headed to Econ lecture, handed off the tickets to the John Caroll lecture to Sunaree
In exchange for “dinner” (read: two pieces of mediocre and cold pizza, a mediocre small salad, a bottle of water, a cookie and $10 to spend at any campus restaurant/cafŽ on my ID card) we (six male students, six female students) were to discuss our “Cal Dining experience” for 90 minutes as led by two outside consultants hired by the university.
First, let me just say that I think focus groups are a great concept. They provide the company with real usable information, and hopefully can use it intelligently — but even better, the group members get paid (usually a pretty good deal — I got $50 for two hours at a Microsoft focus group in LA once) to just rant/rave about a product. They don’t even have to come up with anything constructive, they just have to say why they do or don’t like a product.
Anyway, but the real interesting that happened in Berkeley was the complete dichotomy that existed between two of the most outspoken people in that focus group. One was Ms. Trans-Fat Oil and Mr. Country Club.
It became real clear real fast that she was a typical outspoken, intelligent, Berkeley “healty eater”. Over and over again she kept citing things like “40% of Americans die from high cholesterol and far, so I don’t think we should cater to fad diets like Atkins by having low-carb high-fat diets.” She also seemed to be on her own personal mission to not use “trans-fat oil”, which according to her “is a carcinogen and serves no purpose other than it saves restaurants money.”
She sat across from me.
Sitting next to me was Mr. Country Club. This guy, who didn’t ramble as much, was talking about how one time he was at the Free Speech cafŽ and he seemed to be bothered by the fact that a homeless dude came in and made a mess of one of the tables. He essentially was saying that we should keep “street people” out of campus cafŽs, et cetera. And then, out of nowhere later on, when we were talking about safety on campus at night — he was saying how we should “turn on the sprinklers to prevent loitering”. Garett rightly came out saying that some “street people” might in fact be students, and that you can’t discriminate based on perception.
And I then came out and said that I didn’t care whether or not people were “street people” or not, if you were being obnoxious, then should be asked to leave, plain and simple. Doesn’t matter if you’re a student or not, or if you’re in a suit and tie or you’re barefoot and stinky — if you’re disrupting a normal scene, then you should be asked to leave. Everyone seemed to agree with me on that.
Later on, he suggested that there should be an upscale restaurant on campus like the Faculty Club, where for $7-10, students could be served in a high-quality meal. He claimed that students really would go for that. I highly disagreed, as did everyone else, I think. After that, when we were talking about how food is generally overpriced (a general consensus) at the campus (not the private ones like Free Speech, or Taqueria Reyes) eateries, he said: “Yeah, the food is the same at the country club back home and it’s much less expensive.”
What do you say to someone like that?
But the two of them in the same room together encapsulated everything that I love about Berkeley. Their complete polarization between them, and how neither of them made any sense at all.
As Aaron
