We understood undergraduate hunger. Campus had 3,000 dormitory students normally up until 1 or 2 am and a food service that closed down tight at 6 pm. Hunger was going to happen. Eating was going to happen.
The sound of three thousand rumbling stomachs was the sound of opportunity.
My university club needed a fundraiser, and we convinced a local grocer to let us have his grocery store deli after hours. The grocer asked us to keep inventory of what we used and he would donate it to our cause.
We wanted to provide a fast food fix. We decided that the simplest approach was a sub sandwich. We chose ham and cheese, beef and cheese, turkey and cheese, no subsitutions. We could price it compellingly since our ingredients and labor were donated. We limited open hours from 9 pm to midnight, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. We put up ads on Tuesday.
Thursday evening, we prepared a set of coolers filled with subs and stationed a car in a lot central to all the dorms. 9:00 pm came. The phones started ringing. The deli would take the call, radio town to the waiting car (yes a while back) and the dorm team would deliver subs to the doorstep.
Our delivery time was 2-4 minutes from the call. The customers were shocked, delighted…hooked.
Friday came and the business was four times Thursdays, we added people at the deli, added a runner car to do nothing but run coolers of subs down to campus.
Saturday came and we added a second runner car. We marked our count on a sheet but didn’t have time to look at it until it was over on Saturday.
350 subs on Weekend 1. Weekend 2 was 750 subs. Weekend 3 was 1,300. Weekend 4 hit almost 2,000 subs.
We had blown past our goal in Weekend 2, but kept going to see where it would go. We were tired, had seen way too much of each other, and with homework starting to suffer we decided that we were going to call it quits.
On Monday, following Weekend 4, walked into the student council office. Oh, I was also a sophomore representative in the student government. The student body president, we will call him Wayne, was on the phone with a rather angry vice president of finance and operations.
Wayne repeated the comments – the local sub shops and the local pizza shops were seeing a fraction of their normal business. Someone was running an unlicensed food business on campus and it had to stop.
The student body president held my eye as he was repeating this. I scribbled a note to him quickly with the words “WE QUIT ON SATURDAY.” Wayne confidently assured the VP of Finance and Operations that he would personally see to it that it was stopped immediately. The call ended and Wayne held out his hand and congratulated my club for singlehandedly wiping out the sub and pizza business in town. Wayne also asked me to assure him that we’d not start it up again.