In an initiative to facilitate relationships between students and the community, students can now receive discounts at neighboring restaurants such as Carney’s, Sharky’s, Yen Sushi, Brian’s Shave Ice and Brit Boba if they present their student IDs.
Student discounts vary from restaurant to restaurant: at Carney’s, students received 50 percent off on their purchases Friday. Junior Prefect Cleo Maloney ’21 said that future half-off dates for students would depend on how many students went to Carney’s that day. At other restaurants, such as Yen Sushi and Brian’s Shave Ice, students can receive discounts of up to 15 percent on any day.
Junior Prefect Chelsea Cho ’21 said that Prefect Council began negotiating student discounts at local restaurants due to the new block schedule that will be implemented next school year.
“We want to make it so that all of the seniors can eat off-campus affordably if it turns out that the cafeteria can’t serve everyone in that one hour or whatever time that we have,” Cho said.
Henry Burdorf ’22 said that although discounts at these local restaurants are an improvement, they might not necessarily be useful to a lot of students who do not dine at these restaurants.
“I would’ve preferred it more if these discounts applied to places like Starbucks or Ralphs,” Burdorf said. “Personally, I’ve never gone [to any of the discounted restaurants], because I don’t really have the time to, and I also don’t intend to go [to them] in the future, but I feel like if [Starbucks and Ralphs] were included [as discounted places], this would be a very [beneficial thing to me].”
Student Amy Kronenberg ’20 said that the discounts were actually quite useful to her and that her friends were very enthusiastic about discounts at local restaurants.
“My friends and I were planning to visit the restaurant Carney’s the other day because of the half-off discount but we unfortunately weren’t able to because we couldn’t find a common free [period],” Kronenberg said. “I’ve been to the [Brit] Boba place and the discount was quite nice, but I hope that in the future I might be able to get a discount at Western Bagel because I go there pretty often.”
Cho said that Prefect Council is currently communicating with other restaurants in the neighborhood in order to negotiate discounts for future deals.
