Low on meal points? Overpricing to blame
By Brooke Boniface
Throughout register lines in Benson, students can be often be heard saying to one another, "How many points do you have?" "I'm 50 under already! How did this happen?"
Santa Clara students often find it difficult to subsist on the quarterly points provided to them on basic or preferred plans and frequently fall below the recommended daily totals.
Many times the only way they are able to make it through the quarter is by using friends' points, going away for a weekend, or adding more money to their accounts.
This common occurrence of low meal points can be attributed to a variety of factors, which include overeating and poor point budgeting. However, at the heart of the issue is Benson's tendency to overprice and incorrectly charge students for their food.
According to the point tracker located at each Benson register, students on the basic dining plan are expected to subsist on 15.78 points-per-day to pay for their meals. On the preferred plan, the suggested amount increases to 17.77. But the meals at stations such as Exhibition, Roma and At Home on average cost 7 to 11 points each, with some meals leaping as high as 17 points.
It seems unfair and illogical for Benson meals to be priced in a way that makes it extremely difficult for students to keep up with their dining plan.
Students should feel that they have more than enough points to dine and should not have to scramble around for points toward the end of every quarter, just for a simple meal. After all, students do pay a large amount for these dining plans.
If a student decides to eat at the Pasta Bar, for example, they spend $9.29 for the meal -- more than half of their suggested dining points for the day. In order to stay on track and pace yourself, as is recommended on the school Bon AppetÃt Web site, students have to chose their meals extremely carefully.
This may seem reasonable for people content with three smaller meals in a day. However, for much of the student population, three meals per day is not enough to power them through their hectic schedules. Students often require three meals, snacks, drinks and maybe even a nighttime stop at the Bronco to sustain them.
In addition to extremely high prices, students fight to stay on track because they are frequently charged incorrectly for the items they purchase.
"That will be $1.99, $1.29, $1.69, $1.39, $1.79, $2.88â?¦" while these prices may seem like the costs of several different items, they are actually what I have been charged at various times in the past few weeks for a SoBe Life Water in the Cellar market.
Depending on who is working at the time and whether that particular bottle scans correctly, I get either under or overcharged, sometimes by a significant amount of points. For students who struggle to stretch their points as far as they can, these "minor" mistakes can become extremely costly.
Adrienne Hardee-Elliott, who is both a student and Benson employee says, "I don't think the prices here are reasonable as compared to off campus locations. A lot of students tell me that if they had cash instead of points they wouldn't come here (the Cellar) and that it is overpriced. Basically they say that since this is the only place that takes points, they have to buy stuff here and Bon AppetÃt knows that so the prices are high."
To rectify this constant problem, the responsibility lies equally on Bon AppetÃt and students.
The administration must re-examine Benson prices so that food costs are better correlated with the quarterly points students are allotted. Students should also pay attention to what they are being charged for their items in order to avoid being overcharged.
Only when this happens will student conversations in Benson revolve around something other than "how many points do you have?"
Brooke Boniface is a freshman history and political science double major.