Metro Considering Selling Food– But You Still Can’t Eat It!

Photo courtesy of
‘chillin”
courtesy of ‘staceyviera’

Big news coming out of Metro today: officials are considering allowing kiosks in certain Metro stations to sell packaged food in stations!  The move is an attempt to increase revenue by adding kiosks at a number of stations (in DC: outside Anacostia, in Fort Totten, in Gallery Place-Chinatown, and in Metro Center).  Kiosks could be newsstands, dry cleaning services, and even gourmet food stores.

But no, this doesn’t mean you’d be allowed to eat what you bought at a kiosk– the Metro food and drink ban is still in effect.  About three years ago Metro solicited proposals for kiosks that would sell anything but food, beverages, and tobacco– but they didn’t get a good response and realized it wasn’t profitable to not sell food in transit stations.

This seems a little weird to me.  I think I’d be really bitter if I were starving, and got a gourmet sandwich at a Metro kiosk (probably  marked up ridiculously because of the captive audience), and had to sit there just looking at it the whole ride home.  That’s just mean, Metro.

Shannon grew up in the greater DC area/Maryland suburbs, went to Virginia for college and grad school (go Hoos!), and settled in DC in 2006. She’s an urban planner who loves transit (why yes, that is her dressed as a Metro pylon for Halloween), cities, and all things DC. Email her at Shannon (at) WeLoveDC.com!

6 thoughts on “Metro Considering Selling Food– But You Still Can’t Eat It!”

  1. Wait… wha?

    I got my butt chewed on a train a few days ago for bringing an (unopened) can of soda on a Blue Line train. And now they want to SELL food and drink… that we still can’t bring on the train?

    Who the hell came up with this one? How many monkeys with typewriters do they have over at Metro?

  2. I read in an article the transit police rarely give out citations for eating on the train. Just yesterday I was chomping away on some peanut M&M’s right in front of an officer.

  3. It’s kind of unevenly enforced. They took a lot of (deserved) crap for arresting and detaining a 12 year old girl who ate a french fry and a woman on her way to work who put the last bit of a candy bar in her mouth on the way down an escalator heading into a station. But I’ve also heard of people getting yelled at over the station PA for daring to take a swig from a bottle of *water*.

  4. The only reason I would buy food in a subway station would be to eat it right there. Otherwise, why bother?

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