April 3, 2015
Ohio State and University Dining Services have decided to take the dining plan system in a new direction for the next academic year, eliminating the block program and replacing it with one that is infinitely more complex and is carefully structured to be unable to truly fill the needs of any student.
In an email sent last week, OSU announced that the block system, which has been in place since the quarter-to-semester conversion in 2012, will no longer be available. Instead, students will choose from dining plans that each provide no less than four different ways to pay for the exact same overpriced, under-nutritioned food but somehow all make that food cost different amounts depending on the method of payment used.
“These changes are revolutionary from a business standpoint,” said Dave Isaacs, spokesman for the Office of Student Life, in an email. “No sane consumer would willingly pay more for something from a normal restaurant like McDonald’s or Waffle House just because they used a credit card instead of cash. But by making students pay for an entire semester’s-worth of food up front and then abstracting how much they’re actually paying by using a clever fake monetary unit, similar to fictional currencies like Galleons or bitcoins or Japanese yen, they have no idea how much we’re actually ripping them off.”
Issacs mentioned that the overall goal of the program was to take the worst parts of many different meal plans, including those used by other universities, and combine them all together into a kind of “Greatest Hits” of terrible financial planning. “With swipes, we had the restrictiveness of only being supported at a few locations and the inflexibility of not rolling over from week to week. Obviously those were giant pain points with many students, so we took extra care to include them in the new plan.
“Blocks were terribly wasteful, in that if the food you bought didn’t add up to the exact amount of a block, you wasted that money. Plus, we’ve worked hard to make it impossible for anybody to use up all of their blocks without resorting to buying cases of PowerAde and boxes of cereal marked up to 300% of their average retail value. Those aspects of blocks were already perfect for aggravating the maximum number of students possible, so we left those in the new plan.
“Next, we had to take a look at how BuckID cash was being used. We thought that maybe we could just make it the primary way to pay for meals, but instead we opted to use a second, identical debit system in addition to BuckID cash. The new system, Dining Dollars, are literally the exact same thing as BuckID cash, except far more restrictive, in that you can only use them at campus dining facilities. And not even all of them. We plan on just throwing darts at a map of campus to pick which facilities will accept them.
“Finally, we still felt like the plan wasn’t quite confusing enough, so we racked our brains to come up with ways to really stick it to incoming freshmen who have no idea what fresh hell they’re getting into. We decided on an arbitrary conversion system to turn swipes into Dining Dollars at the conversion rate of one block per swipe.
“We also decided that some plans won’t even be available to freshmen at all. Officially, it’s because we expect second years not to be on campus as much once they get more involved with their extracurriculars and the community. However, that excuse is complete horse shit, because now we’re making all second years live on campus. Actually, I don’t know who came up with that excuse. Was it Brad? Goddammit, Brad, you’re making us look bad here!”
“With all these seemingly arbitrary conversions and identical-but-not-really ways to pay for food, I believe we’ve met our goal of alienating every single student on campus. If we had gone back to swipes, the people who liked blocks would be pissed. If we had stayed with blocks, all those swipe-lovers would have had our heads. This way, nobody is happy.
“Oh crap, I almost forgot to mention the discount! What, you thought I was kidding about us charging different prices for the same item? No, we are actually making it so that stuff is cheaper if you pay with those useless Dining Dollars. Why? Because fuck you, that’s why! It just helps you not use all of them up since we give you so many of them!”
Author’s note: by this point, every Lantern staff member had completely lost any hope of understanding what was actually happening. Several of them had begun having seizures, and Editor-in-Chief Liz Young, her grip on reality decidedly loosened, had climbed on top of the table and recited that monologue from V for Vendetta about the Fifth of November before grabbing Dave Issacs and hurling him out of a fourth-story window in the Journalism Building.
Although OSU hopes the new system will cater to the needs of no students, Chelsie Bresco, a second year in communications with a minor in theater, thinks some students may accidentally find portions of the new meal plan useful at times. “With the traditional visits, you can eat as much as you like,” she said. “Trying to use Dining Dollars or BuckID cash for all that food seems like you would pay a lot more for it.”
University Dining Services also plans on introducing two new plans every year for the next decade. For example, one plan will give students unlimited plus three traditional visits, allowing them to bring three extra people for only a single swipe, but only if those extra people don’t have meal plans of their own. Another plan will give students $3000 in Dining Dollars per semester, which is more than the USDA’s average calculated cost of food for a family of four for one semester, but will not allow students to add any additional Dining Dollars, traditional visits, or BuckID cash. A third plan will operate exclusively on the $5 exchange rate, where weekly traditional visits are all that students are allowed to use, but they can only use them by converting them into $5 blocks, which makes them useless at Traditions locations.
When reached for further comment, Dave Isaacs was unavailable. According to reports, he was last seen twitching on the sidewalk in front of Caldwell Laboratories in a pool of his own blood.
-Josh Bodner, Contributor