As one of Western’s longest and proudest traditions, the Spoke has more than 40 years of memories behind it.

“I hear stories of lineups all the way out to Concrete Beach,” Sacha Kumar, vice-president finance for the University Students’ Council, said of the Spoke’s beginnings.

Once filled with carved wooden tables and crowds of students several nights a week, the Spoke was once the place to be on campus, rivalling the Ceeps and Jim Bob’s in popularity.

But its heyday came to an abrupt end in 2005 when a renovation transformed the bar into a lounge.

Popular events like Rick McGhie nights migrated to the Wave. The menu was revamped and the bar shrunk into the back corner. Soon enough, profits started plummeting and managers had to struggle with how to manage a good idea gone wrong.

“From a financial perspective, it wasn’t the greatest business model,” Kumar said.

Richmond Row also began to boom during this time, with upstart bars like Jack’s and the London Tap House stealing watering hole regulars away from the once glorified Spoke.

“Students were voting with their wallets,” Jeff Armour, USC food and beverage manager, explained. “They said ‘We don’t want to be here. We want the old Spoke back.’”

The Spoke’s profits have been on a steady decline for the past three years.

The Spoke lost $104,116 last year, after losing $96,434 and $48,835 in the two years prior, according to numbers provided by Kumar. He explained the latest deficit is not a real loss since the USC already accounted for the $240,000 of rent the Spoke pays to operate out of the University Community Centre. Essentially, the USC does not have to dip into their pockets to cover the staggering losses.

“In the current model where people can go and just lounge and choose to eat or not to eat, it will be extremely difficult to bring into the black,” Kumar said. “It’s hard to gauge the Spoke purely on [revenue] because it could lose $20,000 more this year and that doesn’t necessarily mean students liked it any less.”

This year, adding to the $240,000 rental fee is the fact the Spoke was closed for the entire summer and most of September, which is traditionally its busiest month. Armour said that hole would be almost impossible to climb out of.

“We knew going in that we were going to have some problems with being closed for so long,” Armour said. “But we weigh that against the benefits of having the patio done and re-launching this new business model and decided [the patio] is worth it for students.”

Also sinking the Spoke’s ship is the current menu, which underwent a facelift when it reopened in September after its most recent renovations. Added was a bar menu featuring meatball sliders, jalapeno poppers and the “Nacho Pie,” which was advertised as a future Spoke favourite.

Armour and Kumar are both currently looking to change the Spoke’s menu once again, with some changes possibly taking effect after Reading Week.

Kumar recently commissioned a break-even analysis on almost every product offered at the Spoke, while Armour speculated most of the Spoke’s bar menu would be eliminated, with former Spoke staples like the grilled cheese sandwich making a return.

“We’re trying to get the margins on the food a little better,” Kumar said. “We’re going to see if we can switch up the suppliers, switch up some products and see if there’s something we can do down there to change the menu so students will like it more.”

When it comes to setting a menu, the USC has a litany of factors to contemplate. Some students want traditional pub fare like fries and wings, while others want healthy alternatives like salads or veggie wraps.

“What students want in terms of product offerings [is] all over the place,” Kumar said. “Low Prices — that’s probably the one thing you’ll find consensus on.”

However, the Spoke’s already discounted prices are part of the reason why the venue is in the red. Armour said food sales have almost doubled since last year while labour costs have increased. If the Spoke raised its prices, it could begin seeing a profit.

“The [profit] margins at the Spoke are very student-friendly,” Armour said. “It’s already an uphill battle. What we have to do is adjust our procedures — especially with labour. We’re reinventing the wheel, basically.”

The options of either outsourcing the Spoke to another company or closing the Spoke altogether are still on the table for the USC.

“I would never close the Spoke unless […] students had a reasonable level of understanding of the situation and I could get feedback from them confirming my decision,” Kumar said. “It may come to the point where we need to take drastic action in the future. But we’re still trying to make improvements. There’s still hope.”

The USC wants to keep the Spoke’s current atmosphere and structure. Students, according to Kumar, do not want to lose their lounge space. But the end goal will be to take the Spoke back to its popularity of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“Six years ago, the Spoke was the place to be at Western. It was a place to be seen,” Armour said. “I truly believe with time we’ll get back there. Just give me more than two-and-a-half months.”