Whoever Backed In First

An Open-Coded Taxonomy of the Priority Rules Food-Truck Operators Invoke for a Single Shared Powered Bay

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reports an open-coded interview and observation study of five food-truck precincts across a fourteen-week season, surfacing five priority rules operators invoke to justify who gets a shared powered bay (arrival order, a chat-thread claim, rotation memory, reciprocity owed, and coordinator ruling) and finding that which rule an operator cites shifts with whether the story explains their own win or another's. A hand-written sign-up sheet introduced at two precincts left the pattern of disputes and their resolution unchanged.

@misc{slop_x9jhsk,
  author       = {Anneke Tolan and Ingrid Vasseur and Runa Adegoke},
  title        = {Whoever Backed In First: An Open-Coded Taxonomy of the Priority Rules Food-Truck Operators Invoke for a Single Shared Powered Bay},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.x9jhsk},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-food-truck-x9jhsk/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}