Almost two weeks ago, the AMS Board of Directors voted unanimously to merge the Greenroom and the Tricolour Market management, and also to move the Queen’s Entertainment Agency into the portfolio of one of Destinations’ assistant managers.
Although the Greenroom and the Tricolour Market will remain in separate locations and contain their current product line, the new management team—consisting of one head manager and three assistant
managers (all 12-month positions)—will oversee both stores. The staff will also work at both stores, similar to how TAPS staff can work at both the Queen’s Pub and Alfie’s.
The intent of the merger is to cut overhead costs by eliminating some salaries and also to ease transition into the Queen’s Centre, where there will likely only be one store to fill the role of both the Greenroom and the Tricolour Market.
Finally, a plan for these two stores that actually makes some sense. Unlike last year’s decision to switch locations of the Greenroom and the Tricolour Market, the management and staff merger is an excellent idea as the AMS will be saving some costs on two money-losing services.
If all that the Tricolour market is doing is buying time—or rather, retail space—for the Queen’s Centre, wouldn’t it be even more cost-effective to keep the space, by continuing to pay rent, but close it down? If the store swap and management merger are only being put into place to ease transition into the Queen’s Centre, it seems it would be best to close one of the services for the next five to 10 years to avoid excess product and salary costs altogether.
It’s also nice to see the AMS make cuts to the long-suffering QEA, which continues to hemorrhage money without ever providing tangible benefits to students. What doesn’t seem to make any sense is that the media and volunteer director will continue to look after QEA, even though Destinations falls under the student services director’s portfolio.
It seems that some of the overlap in positions still needs to be worked out. Hopefully this merger will begin the gradual phasing out of QEA entirely. It’s one of the AMS’s more useless services and eliminating the salaries of the two managers is a long overdue and welcome adjustment.
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.