I love Panda Express. And if the Mom and Pop shops in Lower Sproul were actually turning a profit they could stay. But obviously no one is shopping there, so lets eat something truly delicious…though kinda bad for you.

This is my least favorite kind of elitism.

Also, their orange chicken is downright delicious. I would bathe in a vat of it if possible.

yeah brock! it tastes damn good! you guys should lighten up and enjoy some of that goodness.

There is no way I can support a restaurant that supports selling Panda Meat! And “Express” no less — the horror!

Pandas are endangered animals!

Geez.

I think Panda Express is disgusting and I can’t figure out why people would want to eat there. However, I have no desire to prevent other people from eating crap, so why shut them out? If it’s not right for campus, the students won’t go, and they’ll leave on their own.

But it’s finger ling-ling good!

@foobar22 Haha. That might actually be as bad/awesome as my “wok-off” pun from a while back. If I do say so, myself.

Just another thing to protest at CAL why not…. NO MSG NO MSG

I am sorry I like Panda Express. It’s good and cheap and fast (dirty pun intended). If it is good enough for the Pentagon, it should be good enough for Cal

Besides it’s one of the few fast food restaurants that pays significantly more than minimum wage.

I stopped by the Store Operations Board meeting tonight and I have to say that the folks organizing the resistance to this are impressively on top of their shit.

One student, I think her name was Janet, composed a comprehensive timeline of the Panda Express proposal by reading through the SOB’s minutes over the past two years. Through that process she uncovered the behind-the-scenes plotting that has gone on to make sure that Panda does not have to go through a public Request For Proposals process like every other restaurant does.

Another person to speak, Matt, showed that one of the Auxiliary’s main claims of the past several years– that the lower sproul business are not profitable– was not false. In fact, these business have been around for decades, reliable throughout. One of them is paying above market-rate for their rent. The others are pretty damn close. All are willing to pay market rent. The Naia space, on the other hand, which Panda supposedly is taking over, is less than HALF the market rate, despite the Auxiliary’s false impressions that the Bears Lair business are actually draining ASUC resources (when this is a blatant lie).

I’m just recollecting what I heard at the meeting, but damn, I hope somebody recorded all that because it was a brilliant rebuttal to the Auxiliary’s lies, and also made the Auxiliary’s student-peons look pretty pathetic.

Panda Meat! For the love of god! At least serve Chicken!

yaman: i don’t think most students really care about public requests for proposals (or if it’s done fairly), or that panda would have cheaper rent than other businesses (or whatever it was that was the dispute). i think most students just care about whether or not there is a yummy, delicious, familiar place to eat where they can spend their money for lunch or a snack (even if it is unhealthy).

i for one would appreciate a fast food chain in lower sproul, if mainly because i know what type of food they serve, that it is consistently delicious (an opinion, mind you), cheap, and full of the greasy flavorful stuff that the other restaurants in lower sproul are too afraid to serve (upkeeping with the “berkeley image”).

someone said somewhere that the contract with panda may have included that no other asian restaurants exist on campus, and this is the only thing that alarms me about the whole panda issue (food, delicious food, of all kinds: no one should put a limit on that). <3 food.

If you don’t like Panda Express (I don’t), VOTE WITH YOUR DOLLARS and shop somewhere else. They will go out of business just like any other enterprise.

Of course, that’s not the Cal way. Let’s protest instead!

That sign should have read: “Please No Panda Express or My Muffin Top Will Grow Bigger”

adfadsf, I wasn’t really making an argument about what most students care about (though another student presented a petition suggesting that you’re wrong about most studetns), I was just stating what the speakers at the meeting had uncovered. In fact, the Auxiliary director and members of SOB have already said that what most students want is not binding on them since they can independently exercise their authority according to the rules. The power of what the student speakers at the SOB meeting said was that it showed that the SOB was in fact not following the rules, or, at the very best, was making an active effort to elude them through loopholes and the like, violating the spirit of the rules.

I didn’t mean petition, I meant survey, my bad.

Yaman, do you know if there were any decisions made at the Store Operations Board meeting about the vendors in the Bear’s Lair food court and whether or not the RFP was finalized to bid out their spaces? There was nothing in the Daily Cal about it. I really hope the vendors will be able to stay.

Jim, I don’t know, but apparently the DC says today that they will draft new contracts for them. If they agree to some criteria, they will retain their space, but if not, the proposal process will be re-opened.

That’s great! I found the article. Thanks, Yaman.

Yaman: Hi, I’m one of the 2 students who conducted the survey that you mentioned in a previous comment. I just wanted to point out that the survey wasn’t intended to apply to the Panda issue; it was strictly about the Bear’s Lair. Granted, it’s hard not to extrapolate from the survey results to an inference about student attitudes toward Panda, but that wasn’t our goal. I just wanted to make that clear, because Gregg, who presented the survey results at the SOB meeting, was very concerned about people misrepresenting the results (although he is definitely in the anti-Panda crowd).

Anyway, on a different note, I completely agree with your concerns about the SOB’s procedures regarding Panda.

And Jim Fung: Yay! I too am exhilarated by the Board’s decision not to remove the current Bear’s Lair businesses, but to hold them to higher enviro standards. I hope that the survey was one of the factors in their decision.

“their [Panda's] orange chicken is downright delicious.”

Orange Chicken Rocks!