If you’ve ever had the experience of walking down Legacy Walk on Wednesday at noon or even seen the aftermath littering the brick walkway on Thursday, you might have mixed opinions of Market Wednesday. FSU’s weekly community tabling tradition is such a staple of student life that it gets a shoutout on high school tours, and the number of vendors signing up for tables increases every year.
While many students have a great time on both sides of Market Wednesday, others dread navigating the crowded sidewalks and social atmosphere. Market Wednesday offers many opportunities to connect with clubs and talk to student vendors, but the commotion down Legacy Walk makes it a little harder to get to class.
Not Everybody Needs a Tent
On a walkable campus like FSU, you’ll quickly realize that the flow of traffic is important. I’d compare Market Wednesday foot traffic to the bottleneck created when a four-lane highway abruptly becomes a single lane. Be careful entering this extended tunnel of stop-and-go because you’re about to get really close and personal with whoever is in front of you.
The problem is mostly created by the size of the stands vendors use. If the sellers on each side of Legacy Walk both have entire tents and standing displays extending onto the walkway, that leaves about three feet of walkable diameter for two lanes of people walking single file. You’ll have plenty of time to check out each table, but anticipate seeing multiple tables of repetitive merchandise.
The Merchandise
When you have to stop-and-go down Legacy Walk on your way to organic chemistry, it’s very unlikely that you’d want to see four tents of Pokémon cards, unless that’s your thing. When specific resale items continuously show up multiple times down the sidewalk, the variety of products at Market Wednesday is impacted. In my opinion, nobody needs to be reselling scalped trading cards at a campus market.
When Market Wednesday has student artists selling pottery, paintings, and trinkets, I enjoy looking around, but recently all I’ve seen are five to six identical booths selling “vintage” clothing at astronomical prices. While it’s understandable that student vendors want to turn a profit at Market Wednesday by reselling thrifted clothes, it’s important to remember that the customer base is also made up of college students who are similarly strapped for cash.
Market Wednesday should be a venue for actual art, affordable clothes, and miscellaneous garage sale items. By allowing nearly identical booths housing jewelry, thrift finds, and collectibles businesses to dominate Market Wednesday, we’re driving out unique sellers.
Thursday Litter
You may notice, walking down Legacy Walk on Thursdays, that the sheer amount of trash littering the ground is surprising. There are always abandoned hangers, miscellaneous tags, and table decorations being blown across the sidewalk. “Leave No Trace” isn’t just for parks; anywhere that you rent space, especially if it’s outside, should be spotless when you pack up. Cleanup expectations for Market Wednesday need to be stricter, given that Legacy Walk is such a pivotal location on campus.
The Location
While I don’t particularly enjoy walking through the west side of Market on Wednesday, the east half, where the Registered Student Organizations (RSOs) and university programs table is far more enjoyable, but I still encounter other issues.
I used to table regularly for an organization at Market Wednesday. While it’s clear that having Market Wednesday on Legacy Walk is a great way for organizations to do campus outreach, I noticed that there are so many tables on each side of Legacy Walk that students get overwhelmed too quickly to interact with anything they’re interested in.
Having Market Wednesday on Legacy Walk does increase visibility for programs that might not see a lot of growth otherwise, but between the Florida heat at noon, hundreds of disorganized tables, and a lack of vendor variety, I think that the campus and event may benefit from reconsidering the layout and scale of Market Wednesday.
Want to see more HCFSU? Be sure to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest!