The Online Reflector

After a long day of classes, nothing sounds better than a strawberry smoothie from The Perk. However, you don’t want to waste a swipe, so you go thirsty. The issue of wasting a swipe becomes more apparent to students around midterms, when the swipes begin to run low. This, of course, may be due to odd eating habits, swiping for others or even just experiencing the common human feeling of hunger throughout the day.
However, we are also made conscious of wasting meals because of the limits PFS has set.
Our meal plans require us to use $6 for breakfast and lunch and $6.75 for dinner in the cafeteria. You spend that amount of money whether you get that much food or not. This may not seem like a big waste, but if broken down, we can see how this current system generates several issues such as money waste, health issues and food waste.
According to the University of Indianapolis Web site, a student pays $2,215 for a 19-meal plan, meaning that you are allowed 19 meals a week of the 20 meals offered from the dining hall. As mentioned before, breakfast and lunch swipes are both valued at $6, and $6.75 is the allotted amount for dinner. This adds up to $18.75 a day.
If you go to the Hound Express and buy a piece of fruit, cereal, milk and a drink for breakfast, the total amount you are spending is $2.85. If using a meal swipe, there is $3.25 wasted from that meal. For lunch, you purchase cheese nachos for $2.50 and add a drink for $1.50. This results in a waste of $2.
After a day, you have wasted $5.25. This isn’t a large sum of money, but think about it on a larger scale.
After a week of eating in a similar manner, the amount of money left over would be $36.75. After a month, you have wasted $157.50. No matter how much we spend, PFS gets the money from our plan.
Worse still is the amount of money PFS makes from students on the 10-meal plan.
According to the university’s Web site, each student on the 10-meal plan pays $1,545 for 160 meals a semester in addition to $25 in Dining Dollars. Dining Dollars aside, students pay $1,520 for 160 meals. This averages out to $9.50 per meal. Students on the 10-meal plan are allowed to spend only $6.75 at most per meal, but they are paying $9.50. While it is understandable that PFS wants to make a profit, a profit of more than $450 per student on the 10-meal plan seems a bit excessive.
Another issue that arises when using meal swipes is that one might feel the need to get food to fill the $6 limit, which can lead to the health issues, such as weight gain,and food waste can become an issue.
Students do have two other options to pay for food on campus: Crimson Cash and Dining Dollars. Crimson Cash is limited to the amounts you load onto your student ID card. However, if you’re already paying for a meal plan, why use Crimson Cash for your food when it can be used for other purposes, such as copying.
Dining Dollars is a certain amount of money that comes along with your meal plan. It comes in handy if you’re just a few cents over a meal or just want a piece of fruit. However, dining dollars can’t pay the full amount of meals for the rest of the semester.
With every problem eventually comes a solution and this one is a matter of tweaking the current system. Instead of swiping $6 or $6.75 every time you pay for a meal, you should only have to pay for what you buy.
For example, if you have 19 meals a week, you essentially have $18.75 to spend in a day. With the current system, you pay $18.75 a day whether or not you spend it. With this solution you would still have $2,215 through the semester to spend–you just wouldn’t have to swipe $6 unless you buy $6 worth of food. You would have the same amount of money you have now, but you would get to choose when to spend it, instead of when PFS wants you to spend it. Since we have to pay for our meals in the beginning of the semester, PFS wouldn’t be losing money if it switched from meal to money swipes.