Bringing Food into Competition Venues

[Kevin Sevcik]

Okay. I've been avoiding this thread because, frankly, it's silly.

FIRST has this rule because the vast majority of venues have vendor lock-in contracts for their concessions. They're more or less forced into this by the companies to be able to offer any food at all. FIRST can't do anything about this at all except find a venue without this. I don't want to have a competition in a high school gym, so I put up with this. To sanddrag, this goes for parking too. If you don't like it, I reccomend you trim your team's budget to donate to FIRST the several thousand dollars it'd take to make the problem go away.

Many regionals are already operating on tight budgets and get discounted rates from the venues. Reliant Arena accomodates the LSR machine shop in extra space in one of the large halls. We get that space through the venue's generosity and good will and because we don't use much space. When teams decided to paint in there, work on robots in there, and otherwise set up camp, they had to be kicked out. Yes there was lots of space, yes it wasn't exactly nice, but deal with it. Your only other option is to pony up a heck of a lot of money that it would cost to rent that hall for the weekend.

The same goes for food, parking, and probably whatever else annoys you at an event. Feel free to voice your concerns to the regional committee, but please follow the rules. ALL the rules in the FIRST manual are there for good reasons, including this one. I fail to see how everyone here can accept venue rules like no soldering, no grinding, no noisemakers, and no saving seats, but completely reject the no food rule. ALL of these rules are to keep the venue happy. Parking and food are just two more things that do so. All of these rules are to keep the venues happy with us, which is rather important. Unhappy venues mean higher costs, and higher registration fees for all teams. Do whatever you must to survive within the rules, but please stay within the rules. I can guarantee you that one of the main reasons FIRST had to put this in the official rules was simply because so many teams were already ignoring the instructions from the people at the events.

To further flaunt this rule will only make things worse, and discussing underhanded ways of smuggling food into a venue, cheating your way into free parking and otherwise completely ignoring the rules of FIRST and all the values we're supposed to be upholding should be beneath us and is frankly embarrassing.