I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords…
Watch out, dude, they’re trying to sell us out to the man!
In brief, the University is trying to change up the way it manages the vendors who visit Usdan. As of now, Frank Marsilli, the Usdan facilities and events manager, directly books the vendors, as he has been doing so for the past sixteen years. This year, the University is planning to hire a third-party company, Kiosk Connections, to manage this program and bring in more vendors beginning after Spring Break. These guys are a pretty big company that, as they put it, connects “corporations and specialty retail vendors”: Mary Kay, Avon, to name a few. Their clients range from AT&T to Pfizer to Lockheed Martin.
In other words, not universities.
Alright, so this sounds pretty shitty. And if you’ve been talking to Malcolm Tent—the goateed guy who’s been selling used records at Wesleyan for seventeen years, bonding with more than a few students in the process—it definitely sounds shitty. According to Malcolm, with the way the new program will work, he—and presumably the other regular vendors—won’t be able to afford to keep coming. He really appreciates the Wesleyan community and doesn’t want to lose being a part of it.
