Last Friday, the Retreat announced its plan to streamline efficiency after complaints of long wait times and mass confusion had reached a boiling point. What used to be an organized line into the cafe had turned into an angry parade of students that doubled back on itself due to the confusing layout of the refrigerators. It was now taking the average student 12 minutes to pick up a sandwich and a side dish, and the Retreat executives knew they had to come up with a solution.
Last Thursday, Kay Oss ’24, a Retreat student intern, had the idea to replace the line with a giant, unorganized swarm of people. This chaotic mess somehow worked more efficiently than the Retreat’s current system, with Oss reporting 96 fewer person-to-person crashes on average per day.
The new system has allowed more students to access the much-coveted sushi rolls that the Retreat serves weekly. Adam Smith ’25, an economics major who interns with Oss at the Retreat, explained how the college can afford the packaged gas station-like sushi, the epitome of luxurious fine dining on campus.
“For one day a week, the college pivots all of its investments to purchase the sushi. On Wednesdays (and Wednesdays only), it temporarily outcompetes all 58 of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants in access to high-quality dining goods, causing the College to almost go bankrupt for a few hours.”
The College has apologized for their inability to afford the sushi more than once a week. Smith explained the financial burden to us: “Where would the College find the money? It’s not like our endowment is more than the price of five supersonic jets,” Smith explained. (It is.)
Meanwhile, in local Arlington, sushi restaurants are struggling to compete with the quality of the Retreat sushi, with over 30 percent expected to file for bankruptcy in the next month. “Retreat sushi tastes like golden cream melting in my mouth,” one Retreat diner explained. “Why would I ever go to a restaurant again when I could taste the blissful delight of Retreat-definitely-not-gas-station sushi?”