Beating the Street: An entrepreneurial director finds novel ways to compete with off-campus foodservice options

摘要

Excuse Richard Robinson if he sometimes feels like General Custer at Little Big Horn, Surrounded by adversaries on all sides and with your own resources limited, there's little you can do except keep shooting until the ammunition runs out. Or is there? Here's where the Custer/Robinson analogy diverges, Robinson, who is foodservice director at Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital, is certainly surrounded, Six full-blown Starbucks operations ring the perimeter of the facility's campus, in the city'sgen-trified Lincoln Park area, while some 100 restaurants sit no more than a block away in all directions, much of it no doubt drawn by the presence of DePaul University, tight across the street.