Ash Pickett is a business administration junior and opinion columnist for Mustang News. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
I picked up the phone one day early winter quarter of my freshman year. On the other side of the line was an upperclassman who asked if I was busy. I told her I was between classes, so she asked if I had any extra dining dollars and would be down to do a quick Shake Smart run with her.
With a freshly reloaded allocation of dining dollars in my Grubhub account for the new quarter (and a newfound açai bowl obsession), I gladly agreed and there went an extra $24 down the drain. As we ate our bowls in the University Union, she talked about how when she was a freshman, she paid for upperclassmen’s food on campus all the time. I was just giving back to the cycle by spotting her. Little did I know, this was the first of many times I’d be paying for upperclassmen, and it’d end up wiping me clean of dining dollars before the school year was over.
Besides, dining dollars are fake money! Students are reminded about this daily living in the dorms–it’s a big inside joke that dining dollars don’t feel real since they’ve already been paid for at the beginning of the school year. They’re a deep endless well in the form of a digital Grubhub account, from which you can buy unlimited Scout Coffee lattes and Campus Market breakfast burritos.
But that’s just the thing–dining dollars aren’t unlimited. I, like many others, had to find that out the hard way.
The purpose of dining dollars is to make food more accessible to students who are new to college and adjusting to new environments, friends and homesickness. The culture surrounding them undermines that though, and the perspective that dining dollars are “fake money” forces students to make the decision between being financially responsible and pleasing upperclassmen. It can be emotionally and mentally straining, and it definitely became that for me.
“It tricks you into spending more, so I was more prone to spend more on Shake Smart and other places where the prices were really high. The one-step disconnect between money and dining dollars was tough,” said business administration senior Jaden Lipson, who also ran out of dining dollars multiple times his freshman year.
Early on in my second year at Cal Poly, I found myself calling up a first year and asking him if he’d grab a bowl with me from the newly built 1901 Marketplace, remembering his generous offer the week earlier to pay for my lunch with his dining dollars. While we sat and talked, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of guilt.
Who was I to take advantage of someone else’s dining dollars, even if they offered first, or claimed to have “extra?” Asking a freshman to pay only encourages them to engage in frivolous spending before they understand the pace they’re spending at, which can lead to a deficit in money for food later on.
Plus, those dining dollars were funded by either themselves or their supporters–it was still their hard-earned money, not mine. Upperclassmen should ask themselves that same question before asking their younger friends to spot them.
We need to take the term “fake money” out of our collective Cal Poly vocabulary and be more mindful about respecting other students. We never know the details of somebody else’s financial capabilities, and asking freshmen–who are knee-deep in a period of major adjustment, vulnerability and malleability–to pay for food can be insensitive at times.
This isn’t to say that buying lunch for friends every once in a while is a bad thing. Nor does it mean students spending their extra money on friends near the end of the year are being taken advantage of. It’s generous and kind to treat friends every once in a while.
We simply need to be mindful of the language we use surrounding dining dollars and the culture we create in asking for favors from others. It is a privilege to fall into the “fake money” sentiment, but it happens to many students all the same. As a collective, we need to protect our freshmen from financial burdens in their first year on campus, and dining dollars are a crucial expense to consider.