No Good Deals on Bulk Meals
· © 2000
The web site greats you enthusiastically: “Welcome to University of Massachusetts campus dining. Have we got a plan for you. Our all new and very popular Your Campus Meal Plan is designed for commuter students, juniors, seniors, graduate students, and faculty and staff!”
The Your Campus Meal Plan (YCMP) can be used at both the dining commons and at any of these retail stores on campus: The Hatch Food Court, Bluewall, The Coffee Shop, Starbucks Coffee Cart, Physical Plant Snack Bar, Whitmore Snack Bar, and Hampden Snack Bar.
Unfortunately, it's a rip-off.
None of the campus dining seems to offer a particularly great deal. Dining Services offers two sets of meal plans: the Resident Meal Plan and the Your Campus Meal Plan. Freshmen and sophomores living on campus are required to get one of the Resident Meal Plans. After the Deluxe Meal plan ($1174 a semester for unlimited meals), the largest plan is the Value Meal plan which, at $1076 for 224 meals, costs about $4.80 per meal. The 160 meal, $950 Basic Meal plan is the next smallest meal plan after the Value plan and the smallest of the three Resident Meal Plans; it costs an average of about $5.94 per meal.
The largest Your Campus Meal Plan is almost the same size and almost the same price as the Basic Resident Meal plan. The 154 meal Economy Meal plan costs $949, for an average of about $6.16 per meal.
However, you can only exchange a meal for a maximum of $5.50 worth of food at non-dining hall locations. Thus, those meals you do eat at the dining common are pretty expensive. For example, if you get the Economy Meal plan and eat half of your meals at the dining commons and half at "meal exchange" places, you are effectively spending about $6.82 per meal in the dining commons. (You would be better off getting the next smallest YCMP, the Commuter Meal plan, and using it exclusively at the dining commons, paying cash at other locations.) The fewer meals you eat at the dining commons, the worse (financially) the YCMP deals get— which seems to defeat the purpose. In fact, if you get the "Economy" YCMP and never eat in the dining commons, using all your meals at other locations, you are donating over $100 to Dining Services. And if you were to eat every one of your 154 meals in the DC, you would be better off with the Basic Meal plan.
With the $485, 79 meal Commuter Express plan you receive fewer meals than the Economy Meal plan but for some reason the average price of a meal goes down, to about $6.14. The smallest meal plan available, YCMP's Light, gives you 35 meals for $225, or about $6.43 per meal. All of the YCMPs cost well over the $5.50 per meal that they are worth outside of the dining commons. Apparently, Dining Services nets upward of sixty cents every time you use YCMP outside of the dining commons. One must also remember that using a YCMP meal at a campus retailer and spending less than $5.50 means losing the difference (to the place you buy the food, at least, and not to Dining Services). This is a minor annoyance, at best, and almost inevitably makes using the Your Campus Meal Plan on your campus still less advisable.
Because the Residential Meal plans don't include one for under 160 meals, a YCMP option may be your best choice if you want to eat in the dining commons under 150 times this semester: ideally, thirty-five or seventy-nine times. But you are being robbed by Dining Service's crazy idea of economies of scale. Or maybe they just know that no one ever uses up the meals on the larger meal plans. Dining Services should stop trying to force people to buy more meals than they need (and more meals than they will probably use) and allow people to buy small numbers of meals at a fair price. I don't feel that it should be almost prohibitively expensive to enter a dining common with cash.
In my opinion, if you plan on eating at the dining commons a lot, your best bet financially is to get a Resident Meal plan and spend cash at the other places available through the Your Campus Meal Plan— no matter how many times you want to eat at them. There is no such thing as a YCMP for under six dollars per meal, so every time you use it outside of the dining halls (for a maximum value of $5.50 a meal) you lose money as compared to paying cash.
If you are planning to eat at the dining commons some significant number of times under 150 meals, a YCMP may be your best bet. In general, you want to get the smallest plan that will cover all the times you want to eat at the dining commons and pay cash everywhere else.
If you want to eat at the places on campus that are part of YCMP and intend to go to the dining commons only rarely or not at all then you are much better off spending just cash.
There is another way to pay for meals in advance in the Amherst area. The Off Campus Meal Plan (OCMP), from a private company, ranges from about $6.07 per meal if you order 266 meals at once to about $6.58 per meal when you get only 35 meals at the same time. Participating businesses are required to provide you with $5.75 worth of food per meal; OCMP suggests that they might give you more. This means that you either lose money or else the restaurant you eat at is subsidizing your meal (or some combination of the two). You get no guaranteed benefit for paying for a whole lot of meals up front. Included in the restaurants participating in the Off Campus Meal Plan are the following on campus establishments: Earthfoods, Greenough snack bar, Newman Center, and Sylvan snack bar. Apparently, you cannot use the YCMP at these places.
None of the plans from anybody lets you carry meals over to the next semester. Since paying cash at the dining commons means paying ridiculous prices for meals, if you plan to eat there regularly you have to get a meal plan through Dining Services. (The price may not be great and the hours short, but I think the food is good – and improving – and it is all-you-can-eat.) As for eating away from the dining commons, I suggest that you set aside the money that you would spend on YCMP or OCMP, strictly forbid yourself from using that money to have pizza delivered, and use it to hit every local restaurant you can, on campus and off— going back to the places you like, and never having to care who accepts what meal plan or how many meals you have left.
Web Sites mentioned in article
http://www.aux.umass.edu/diningservices/ycmp.htm
(archived version)
http://www.aux.umass.edu/diningservices/residentialplan.htm
(archived version)