"End Aramark's Monopoly"

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Evan Barker, an opinion columnist at Middle Tennessee State University, may not go to a well-known college, but his call to "End Aramark's Monopoly" (click here) has almost-universal application at just about every campus in the United States...

You can click here and check out the article yourself, but here are some highlights:

* Aramark had a contract which specified FRESH fruit, but tried to switch to CANNED fruit. Yeah, Aramark, really sneaky.

* One professor preferred to pay $25 for coffee, bagels and orange juice rather than pay Aramark $87 or fill out forms TO BEG PERMISSION FROM ARAMARK to use another vendor.

* The columnist used the same simple tactic as my "What's behind your lunch" series, simply Googling articles about Aramark to uncover unhappy students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...and the University of Houston...and the University of Manitoba...and Trent University...Elon University...Witchita State...and more.

(Geez, I could sit around all day finding and aggregating all those articles!)

* In an extremely clever act of "issue framing," the columnist called Aramark "the Walmart of food services" due to their signature moves of outsourcing and low quality.

That's great. I think I might use that, sometime, in the headline of a blog post.