Bon Appétit Wants To Take More Of Your Money By Assuming You're Bad At Math

Bon Appétit introduced a new program where students can exchange unwanted meal swipes for Dining Dollars. It sounds like a great way to keep freshman out of the rotten apple filled, cockroach infested dining halls. Penn Dining will credit $4.75 in Dining Dollars for each swipe that can be used to buy muffins with nails in them at locations such as Houston Hall. 

...but wasn't your meal plan like $5,000? An Under The Button investigation revealed that the default Best Food Fit (BFF) freshman dining plan costs a staggering $4,928. This plan includes $800 Dining Dollars and 250 meal swipes. Dining Dollars have the same value as real dollars, except they're worse because you are limited to use them only at Bon Appétit locations. So we subtracted that $800 from the total and got $4,128. Divide that by 250 swipes and we arrived at $16.52 per swipe. That means Bon Appétit is snatching $11.77 in value per converted swipe. This seems almost as sketchy as making every freshman buy an unwanted and overpriced plan in the first place.