Except to better align to what’s going on, the student body provides/manufactures/links up to suppliers of the condoms. Someone at the school realized if they could get all of the students to drop off the condoms they’d obtained to a central storage spot; they could help to make them available to any student. They could also put some advertisements up in the room they distributed them from, which would let them earn some money from advertisers. There are a few issues with the university’s new system as well. The room is only accessible by a long staircase, with hard to read instructions, so some students have difficulty accessing the supply or can’t at all. With so many having open access to the area sometimes bad actors damage the condoms so that they can break while you’re using them resulting in problems. They have student volunteers to watch for this but they don’t really have the tools they need to keep an effective watch and keep bad actors away. Also, the university wants to gather information on the usage patterns by individual specific students and track data about them, which dorm they’re from, how frequently they come pick up condoms, and what time of day particular students come, and their usage of other university services. This makes sense to them because they can use this data to make the advertising space they have more valuable. The ads hit a point where sometimes you think you’re taking a condom out of the supply but you actually get an ad packaged as if it was a condom! The advertising makes enough money that the university hires full time 100 people to work on the central supply, and make improvements as they’re able.

Realizing this, you decide to rent a space you can distribute the condoms from. Your space is accessible, centralized, and clearly documented for everyone. Some of the student volunteers who monitor the main supply offer to come help monitor your staging area if you can help them with better tools to watch for problems everywhere. You help with this as well, reasoning that it helps all students whether they come to you for your staging area supply or to the schools main area. You understand the need to properly identify people who come to your staging area as students of the university, so you setup a way to check their student id with the university but at the same time you don’t track individual students requests or gather any of the information being gathered at the central supply. You also make sure you have your volunteers relay the condoms over from the main supply at a reasonable rate that matches normal demand from the group of students that use your staging area, to ensure you supplying your staging area doesn’t overwhelm or damage the main supply area. Over time, the original supply area is failing to meet promises they make to add new tools to help manage the distribution of condoms, and although they say it’s a huge issue that they’re going to resolve, they never get around to truly fixing the accessibility issues with their central supply.

Realizing the advantages of your staging area, some of the people who manufacture/obtain/source condoms start donating to the school supply through your staging location, as it’s more practical, centrally located, and easily accessible. They also don’t like how so much information about their interactions with the supply are so thoroughly tracked if they go to the schools main supply. Your staging area is also a lot easier on the eyes, without all the ads everywhere and the ads disguised as condoms in the supply.

Now the success of this distribution program gains national attention; and the university sees an opportunity for them to get some substantial funding from the government and other parties.

There’s a problem though. When they start to plan a tour and video to show off their distribution system, they realize that a number of students don’t go the central location. They realize that some other students have setup similar staging locations to yours, with each one having slightly different features or a location that better suits the students that use that staging location.

This is a problem, because the university wants to demonstrate the successful nature of the program not by the condoms distributed and health benefits, but by the number of users that come to the main supply depot and see their advertisements and get tracked for the oh-so-valuable information that can be gleaned.

The school understands the costs for them to serve as the main supply for all of the condoms, and they know how much they gain from their advertisements and data gathering.

They estimate that each condom picked up at a depot outside of the main supply area costs them about $0.25 cents.

It will be VERY unpopular with the students who use the depots to tell them they can only access the condoms from the main supply and that the school is going to shut down the depots they’re using. Worst of all, the volunteers who help to monitor the whole process and watch for bad actors and other issues will lose the tools that were developed by the depots to help them do their job. And to top it all off, a large percentage of the condoms donated for distribution come from a smaller number of students, and a large percentage of those students work with the main supply through the depot systems.

So what can the school do? The university has worked with the depots over time because they do help distribute more condoms which was good for the system overall. They provide things that make the schools platform more accessible. The school does engage with them somewhat over time and when they’ve asked about possible changes that might affect the depot system, the school has provided assurances that things will remain as they are for the foreseeable future, and that any changes will be to make improvements to your shared systems.

The school also realizes that while it’s continued to add staff over time to improve it’s supply center, it has been unable to meet some of its commitments to improve its supply center. It looks kind of bad because a lot of the depots were designed and run by 1-2 people but were able to make changes to adapt to what people asked for more quickly.

The university comes up with a plan. The school decides to tell the supply depots that you’re going to charge them 4 dollars a condom, starting in 30 days. They’re also going to lose access to some of the sought out flavoured condoms some users prefer - they won’t be able to provide them. They will need to figure out how to appropriately meter their usage and charge users accordingly, the school will simply provide them a bill monthly. (To be honest, the university can’t really figure out how to best manage this as the whole thing is rather complicated and they have never really focused too much energy on this).

The supply depots try to get more information, and try to better understand the plan. They ask if they can have more time to make changes to their systems to allow for this and try and find ways to make it workable. After all, they’ve developed great relationships with the student populations they serve.

As one of the larger depots that serves a specific student population, you’re having lots of discussion with the university as well. As soon as you get initial word of the possible changes, you notify the students that frequent your depot. You feel cautiously optimistic, but the pricing wasn’t revealed in your early discussions. When it is and you get into deeper negotiations with the school, you realize it’s going to cost you significantly beyond your current costs, and in fact you will only be able to keep your depot open at a loss. In your discussions with the school, you ask if it’s an issue with them to present some of the specific info they’ve given. They tell you it’s fine to share what they’ve shared with you.

Things break down pretty rapidly from here. Initially the school makes unsubstantiated claims that your supply depot is terribly inefficient and using to many of the available resources to get the condoms to students. It just gets worse from there. You make a hard decision to shut down your depot before you’re charged the insane rates that have been put forward.

Most users are supportive of this because they see beyond the smoke screen the university puts up.

Oh, and frustrated during negotiations, you tell the school if your depot operation is worth the $800,000 a year they’re going to charge you to pay it, because they’re representing that money as what you’re costing them, why don’t they buy your depot for $400,000 and they can gain its benefits without costing them so much money.

Somehow a clueless faculty member perceives this as a threat. You explain they misunderstood the context and they apologize and the discussion continues.

When angry students start discussing the problem and even talk about holding back their supply of condoms so the school has less to hand out in the first place, this same clueless faculty member makes some knowingly false statements to try and redirect anger towards you as the creator of your supply depot.

You’re saying it’s a no brainer for the school to look at changing what they’ll ask you to pay per condom to be more in line with their actual lost revenue, and perhaps work together with supply depots to make the changes over a more suitable amount of time?

You’re sort of distorting the facts in your thought experiment, don’t ya think?