Possible solutions

We organized a special meeting in Taos to discuss the problem of lack of cups. There were 27 people in the mentioned meeting and we all came up with some solutions to try to solve the issue.

One of the possible solutions was to enforce “cup raids”, that is, check all the rooms for cups that people have hoarded. The kitchen manager and a witness elected by the residence would be the ones in charge of doing those cup-raids that are to be announced at least 24 hours in advance to let people have a chance to return items. Those cup-raids would have to be done each time we had less than 70 cups in the kitchen and for each found item, the room owner will be charged a fixed amount of money we would to decide on.

Another possibility, the one I propose as the best one, is to perform “semi-random cup-raids.” This solution is essentially the same as the previous one but with the exception that it is only done in a few rooms chosen randomly by the kitchen manager. In this case, the kitchen manager would write all the room numbers on pieces of paper and put them inside a box. Then, the witness would take out 15 papers with the room numbers they would have to check. Those numbers would have to be put back inside the box for the next time. In this case, there would be a couple of cup-raids a week (Tuesday and Friday, for example) although the kitchen could decide whether to do more or less cup-raids keeping in mind that there should always be 70 or more cups in the kitchen.

Another possibility was to buy new cups. The policy of the co-op says that we are not allowed to take money from the general fund to buy stuff that has disappeared because of bad use. This rule prevents the residence from wasting money in buying hundreds of cups, spoons, forks or whatever every three months, so if we want to buy more cups, everybody should be charged few dollars for that purpose. If this solution was approved, we would have to organize another meeting to decide the amount of money each of us should pay according to the prices of cups, which the kitchen manager would have had to look up beforehand.

The last possibility was commented was to buy disposable cups that could be thrown away after one use and let people take these items to their rooms.