It’s time we discuss what’s on everyone’s mind. The cookies at Boulevard are better than the cookies at Blue Chip for a number of reasons: scarcity in the market, consistency of quality and dilemmas of ethics.
First and foremost, we have to talk about the scarcity of cookies.
Boulevard does not make its cookies multiple times a day, it makes one batch of cookies every day. That’s it. You either get one on a given day or you don’t. There’s no coming back a few hours later and getting the cookie you want.
Blue Chip on the other hand makes its cookies just about all day long. If the Ranger cookie is sold out at 10 a.m. when you want one after class, it’s not too big a deal. You can come back later and have one after lunch.
This severely reduces the value of the cookie as it is over abundant. The rarer the cookie the more valuable it is. Thus, the Boulevard cookie is more valuable than the Blue Chip cookie.
Next we need to talk about consistency of quality.
Because Boulevard cookies are made once a day, there is little opportunity to fuck it up. It’s made the same way every day no matter what. You don’t get a cookie that is burnt or underbaked. It doesn’t have too few chocolate chips or too many. It’s consistent. You know what you are going to get every time you have been granted the privilege of buying one.
Blue Chip cookies are made all day, every day. They are made by a variety of different people and each person puts a different level of care into their making. Sometimes they are burnt and sometimes they are underbaked. More importantly, however, is the humongous variation in contents. Some cookies are huge and some are tiny, and some cookies have loads of fillings while others have too few.
Cookies from Boulevard are good no matter the day you get them. But every time you buy a cookie from Blue Chip you are gambling with the opportunity for a satisfying dessert, and often you are disappointed.
Finally, we should talk about the ethics of cookies.
Blue Chip makes a cookie called the Smarties cookie based on Nestlé’s Smarties. This simple problem with this is that it supports Nestlé, a company that buys water in BC for $2.25 per million litres only to sell it you for a similar price per bottle, is accused of using child slavery in Ivory Coast and admitted to it in Thailand, and let’s not forget that Nestlé is accused of killing babies through the latter half of the 20th century.
This is all to say that when you buy certain cookies from Blue Chip, you and the AMS are supporting an abhorrent company with awful practices. And on those grounds, along with cookie rarity and quality consistency, Boulevard offers better cookies than Blue Chip.
Zubair Hirji is a first-year student in the Master of Food and Resource Economics Program. He is also the former treasurer of The Ubyssey.