When walking into the cafeteria, you will see some long lines and people bustling around in all directions. This is following the changes made in the cafeteria this year, where the cookies are now located and where the salad bar was moved to.

When going up to the “new cookie station,” you may notice an extremely long line. This is not because there is suddenly a huge spike in cookie demand, but because so many students are going to the same place for so many different things causing the line to clog up. People going to the same spot are asking for cookies,chips, soup, and desserts, and it gets backed up to a long line that can wrap around the center counter at times.

In previous years, going up to the checkout ladies everyday and for a cookie resulted in a friendship. This friendship allowed you to ask for the type of cookie that you liked and get some options, like doughy, crispy, or chocolaty. My favorite kind of cookies are the kind that are very doughy in the center and slightly crispy on the edges. On occasion, the ladies at the checkout would save me a particularly good cookie until I went up to buy it. In addition to cookies, conversations would also be exchanged, but now that the cookies have been moved by the soups, these relationships have suffered.

Another change that came to our Riverside Brookfield cafeteria is the movement of the salad bar. In addition to salads now being available every day, they moved the bar outside of the food court. This just causes more confusion because, not only are there long lines people are “subtly” pushing you out of, but now there are people cutting into the lines from the salad bar. So, the result of switching the location of the salad bar is people going in all different directions trying to get to the same spot first, and lots of people getting pushed around. As a cookie lover, changing where the cookies are is a bad decision. It affects the entire flow of the cafeteria, and I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way. Basically, now that the cookies are moved I can not get the same quality ones I used to, the salad line is causing confusion, and I no longer get the same experience I used to know and love.