Students can now purchase food and receive discounts at certain on-campus locations with a new program similar to EagleBucks.
Called Dining Dollars, the program will function as a refundable account separate from the existing EagleBucks account.
While EagleBucks may be used at off-campus and non-dining locations, Dining Dollars may only be used at on-campus dining locations. All six meal plans, including the new 175-block option, now include $200 in Dining Dollars and $200 in EagleBucks.
Dining Dollars will also have financial benefits. Students who pay with Dining Dollars at Pronto, Salsa, the Tavern and the Eagle’s Nest will receive a 15 percent discount. At Einstein Bros. Bagels and Subway, students will receive a 10 percent discount with Dining Dollars. No discounts will be given for using EagleBucks.
All students can add Dining Dollars to their AUIDs whether or not they have a meal plan, just like EagleBucks.
Purchases at on-campus dining locations will use Dining Dollars as the primary form of payment, but will also pull from EagleBucks if there are no funds available on a student’s Dining Dollars account, according to a Housing and Dining memo sent to students in May.
Housing and Dining Executive Director Chris Moody said, as students already spent around $200 of their meal plan’s initial $300 in EagleBucks on food on campus, “Dining Dollars” is just a name change for those EagleBucks.
“We hope Dining Dollars helps with the flexibility of the meal plans,” Moody said. “We’ve learned that students largely disassociate EagleBucks from being part of the meal plan … our hope with Dining Dollars is to make that connection.”
Unused Dining Dollars from the fall semester will carry over into the spring semester, but will expire at the end of the school year. Unused EagleBucks will continue to be usable for the entirety of a student’s time at AU.
Instead of the $300 declining balance fund provided by EagleBucks, students now have a total of $400 per semester to spend at on-campus dining locations. The price of each meal plan, in turn, is increasing less than $100. A university budget subsidy requested by Auxiliary Services is providing the money for the balance increase, in what Moody said is a one-time financial investment that will pay back over time.
Dining Dollars limited to on-campus locations Dining Dollars cannot be used anywhere off-campus. Moody said the strategy is to keep food purchases on campus to help finance AU retail locations and continue University growth rather than that of third-party dining locations.
“[Keeping Dining Dollars on campus] is a way to secure that all the meal plan money wouldn’t be going to off-campus vendors,” he said.
Students are reacting favorably to Dining Dollars following the University’s announcement of the program at the end of the spring semester, according to Moody.
“Students like having the additional balance,” he said. “People like discounts at Bon Appétit locations without increases in the price of the items … and [reactions] have been positive that you can still use EagleBucks off-campus.”
Housing and Dining will continue to monitor the response to Dining Dollars by issuing student surveys in the fall and comparing yearly data on spending at all food locations.
“Food is something that everyone has an opinion about,” Moody said. “It’s trial and error to figure out what people say qualitatively and … do quantitatively, how they spend their money.”
The Dining Services Project Team, a committee of students, faculty and staff, researched the benefits of adding another declining balance account to the meal plan. The team created the Dining Dollars program after a recommendation in 2008 from professional dining consultant John Cornyn of The Cornyn Fasano Group, according to Moody.
Dining Dollars and EagleBucks accounts can both be accessed at www.eaglebucks.com.
