It was business as usual yesterday at Food Court and other Dartmouth Dining Services establishments after the Student Assembly voted unanimously Tuesday night to cancel its planned boycott.
Most employees of DDS and students were not surprised the SA boycott did not occur.
"I didn't expect it to take place. I think that the students are treated very fairly at Thayer. We comply with their wishes," Caren Giaccone, a Food Court employee, said.
The administrative branch of DDS did not expect the boycott to happen either, said Jerry Gambell, assistant director of DDS.
"I wasn't surprised that it didn't happen due to the publicity that support was wavering," Gambell said. "But I wouldn't have been surprised either way."
But some DDS employees did believe the students would follow through on the boycott threat.
"I thought that it would happen. ... I thought that they were going to tie me up and not let me in this morning ," Donna Dayton, a DDS employee, said.
Harold Mossey, another DDS employee, said he expected the students to follow through.
"Usually when the students say they're going to do something, they do it if they believe in it," he said.
Matt Berry '94, SA nominations committee co-chair, said he was pleased the boycott was avoided.
"Why boycott if there's no reason to?" Berry said. " When we put our boycott option on the table, it was because no progress had been made to implement reform."
But Berry maintained the threat of boycott did play a role in the progress that was made.
"Nicole Artzer can talk all she wants about the boycott's accomplishing nothing, but she's just plain wrong," he said.
DDS administrators said they did not prepare for the boycott.
"Everything was going to be business as usual," Food Court Manager Beth Jones said. "I understand there was a boycott some years ago, but that did not hurt DDS. The students got nothing for their punch and we got the money from their punch," she said.
Gambell said the extent to which the boycott would have hurt DDS would have depended onthe number of students who participated.
"If you had 100 percent participation, then there would have been some expenses that we wouldn't have been able to cover, but if the participation had been 25 percent, it wouldn't have affected us that much."
He said only a minimal amount of food would have gone to waste had the boycott been effective because "most of the food is made to order."
Students had mixed reactions to the canceled boycott.
"I never expected it to work." Lindsey Noecker '97 said. "I think the freshmen get ripped off, but DDS has to get the money somehow and it would just be gotten another way. I doubt that even if the task force hadn't gone into effect that it would have mattered."
Charles Chung '97 said, "You already paid for your declining balance account and punches. What are you going to do? Sit on it? I would have eaten here anyway."
