A little scurvy goes a long way

To the Editors:

"Well, we've got some TV Dinners left." "No, I want actual food I can use to make myself some dinner." "Like what?" "Like vegetables. I want vegetables." "I think they've got vegetables in 'em." "I want real vegetables." "They must've been real at one time."

Do you see anything wrong with this? Believe it or not, this was an actual conversation I had just a few minutes ago with a CDS employee at the Wilder ex-Snack Bar. My problem is that I am on the new 7 meals per week plan and right now I am frustrated, mad as hell, and of course, hungry.

When I signed up for the plan, it seemed the least of 3 evils and the most convenient for me, since I understood that I could eat 7 meals on campus and then buy my groceries at the Convenience Store with Flexdollars and make my own meals. Not so. Not only is the Convenience Store trying to charge exorbitant prices - they charge twice as much as local stores like Missler's - but there is nothing to eat there. To walk in, you'd think the bomb had just hit and this was all that was left of the rations. They seem to have it backwards, carrying items that sell only once in awhile in even the biggest stores, and neglecting the basic staples- bread, milk, eggs, vegetables- you get the idea. No one there even understands what else the student body could possible want, but it's pretty obvious; if whoever's buying for CDS could undertake the hard research of, say, walking into a grocery store, maybe there would be some progress. Till then I guess it'll be Heathbar-sardine casserole night, oh boy.

Last year, I (along with many students) thought CDS was really pushing the envelope in claiming to offer 'meal options' which all cost the same amount. Most schools let you pay less for less meals- a leap of logical reasoning just too big for CDS to handle. So now we have Flexdollars. Which are useless. Now, if we could use Flexdollars at places OTHER than the dining halls and convenience store, we might have a good system. For instance, how hard would it be to give Missler's a validine machine and let students buy food there? Or at other places in town? The merchants would be guaranteed payment, since the students have paid in advance, students would be a lot more likely to spend money in town, and CDS wouldn't have to bother figuring out what groceries regular people like to buy.

And if it's too difficult to organize that much (and it has been done very successfully at other schools), why doesn't the college allow us to use Flexdollars for other fees? Paying off additions to our term bills. Lab fees. Bookstore items. Financing computers at the computer store. Laundry machines. Sodas. Photocopies. There are a lot of things we pay for which could easily be paid for with Flexdollars, but instead we're stuck paying for canned Viennese sausage and corn muffin mix from 1962.

Oberlin and CDS can't continue to go halfway on this issue. Either let us use our Flexdollars to buy actual food in normal sizes at non-inflated prices, let us use our Flexdollars at lots of places on and off campus - or eliminate the system and give us refunds. And if these ideas seem ludicrous, why don't we let the heads of CDS buy all their groceries at the Convenience Store for a week? A little scurvy can do wonders for your decision-making capabilities.

-Alice Dodge College Junior

Wanna go in on a gallon of soup at Oberlin College's quickie mart?

To the Editors:

You know, last spring, I thought something was wrong with the administration's supposed meal plan reforms. Maybe it was the complete uniformity masked by superficial and inconsequential "choices" of how you wanted your predetermined hunk of cash to be separated. Maybe it was just the whole concept of "flex dollars" (flex presumably standing for flexible) that can only be used for one of two things. Maybe I was worried about the idea of a seven-meal plan presumably dependent upon the coinciding 400 flex dollars to be spent at a "convenience" store, the plans for which resembled nothing so much as a quickie mart (gas station adjunct store).

Well, here it is fall semester and my fears have been confirmed. Having dutifully sent my required cheque for over two thousand dollars to the meal plan fund (couldn't we go ahead and buy a starving East African country and feed them for this money? I mean, someone should eat from it, since I'm certainly not), I tried out the options. Went the safest route the first day, headed up from my apartment next to Missler's to Stevenson for dinner. Stevenson was, unsurprisingly, more crowded and uncomfortable than usual. Tried Dascomb for lunch one day. The lines were twenty deep at each counter, and I couldn't figure out from the confused people milling around waiting for stuff and running to find other things any system of protocol or even the correct traffic flow. I ended up riding my bike home for a tuna sandwich. At long last I tried the convenience store. Waited for half an hour for a sandwich, and found out I couldn't even pay with board. That's fine; I have a zillion flex dollars to kill.

And I do mean kill in the sense of waste; there's nothing at the "convenience" store that I would conceivably need. I do not need a dining hall sized can of soup or a huge selection of candy bars. You can only drink so many strawberry slushies. And I know that we're college students and our culinary skills are limited, but what do you do when your idea of "something different for dinner" ranges beyond a different kind of the seventeen varieties of pasta sauce?

I understand that the administration claims that we have choices now, that they have catered to the students by making a meaningful reform. And I admire, in a twisted way, the way that although they changed practically nothing, they are now free to push back further reform for up to (I'd guess) fifteen years by citing these recent "reforms". I understand that there is no way to convince people (despite plentiful evidence) that a small school can support a meal plan wherein you pay for what you actually eat; I know that the administration harbors a fear that if I go off meal plan, everyone else will too. What I don't understand is this: If I'm supposed to live entirely off of my seven meal / four hundred flex dollar plan, why can't I buy what I need at the convenience store (i.e.: Kleenex, razor blades, toilet paper, produce, rice, sugar, flour, eggs, bread, paper towels, ant poison, a new pen, a gallon of milk, a box of light bulbs, etc... things I am constantly spending real money for at Missler's)? And this: If they're so flexible, how come the cashier at the bookstore just laughed at me when I told him I'd be paying for my $238.32 worth of books with flex dollars?

-Melon Wedick College Junior