When you’re a student, and a person, or alive, for that matter, you tend to be hungry sometimes.
Hunger is as inevitable as procrastinating on assignments that really deserve to be worked on prior to the night before the due date. What is also inevitable is that sometimes, the dining hall menus don’t exactly seem fulfilling or too tantalizing – this is where the other university meal options come into play, and also, when the two convenience/market-type stores we have on South and East, respectively: Merrimack MRKT and The P.O.D. can be useful.
Merrimack MRKT (with the cool stylization), located on the second floor of the renovated and refurbished McGauvran Center, is relatively large, compared to its surroundings, and is full of items you’d expect to find in any convenience store: candy, cookies, juices and coffee drinks, chips, crackers, condiments, bread, milk and dairy, medicine and toiletries, protein bars, and cereal, to name a decent chunk of its inventory.
The P.O.D., located on the first floor of Fox Hall in an inlet jutting out from Fox Common, has pretty much all the same stock: candy, cookies, condiments, chips, milk and other drinks, toiletries, frozen foods, and ready-made sandwiches, to name a lot of it, albeit in a smaller, more compact space.
The telling difference between these two similar stores is that the MRKT benefits not only from being in the redone McGauvran Center, providing a nice backdrop and atmosphere outside of the shop, but also, that it contains its own bakery and fresh foods section. The bakery produces its own cakes, cupcakes, and other snacks of that variety, whereas the P.O.D. doesn’t have the room for such an enterprise. (Though the P.O.D. does have fruit, which is a nice choice for those health-minded people out there, whoever you are.)
Merrimack MRKT is the shiny new store that gets a lot of attention, while the P.O.D. remains as the sturdy and reliable old-timer that gets things done with no fuss or complaint. The market is like the brand new luxury car that has all those fancy technological add-ons, but it still is a car to take you from one place to another, and The P.O.D. is that 1999 Camry that keeps on plugging, somehow. the P.O.D. has its convenient placement within Fox, for those residents, and Merrimack MRKT has its central location in the middle of McGauvran. Both come together to add their own flavors to the food mix at UMass Lowell, but with different styles, and make it so whatever campus you’re on (between South or East, at least), there are a lot of snack-food options, on top of a lot of other foods, drinks, and miscellaneous supplies.
So when the hunger comes, or, actually, just a panging for some cookies or something, and you can’t make it off campus, both of these places are a good bet to solve your stomach’s woes. Unless you want to use your meal plan that you pay thousands for and go to the dining hall instead.
