Cafeteria must post proper price labels

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Graphic by Sarah Marron '24

The cafeteria is home to many food options, but some aren’t labeled with their price, leading to confusion at the register.

Walking into the cafeteria, you are greeted with a plethora of food options: meals, fruits, snacks, and drinks. You pick out an apple and a drink to go with your meal, and walk over to the register. After putting in your student ID, the lunch lady informs you that you have run out of money in your account, even though you refilled it recently.

A big factor that leads to this confusion is the lack of consistency with price labels in the cafeteria. Some food items will be labeled with a distinct “$1.00” next to them, indicating its price. However, a lot of the more expensive, individual items, like water, will not be labeled, leaving students and teachers ignorant about the prices. Therefore, I believe that the cafeteria should display their prices to enable students to budget and account for what they are buying.

It would be helpful to students if all the prices were posted so they can better budget for the inflated prices outside the cafeteria.

— Sarah Marron '24

Especially with the widespread inflation that the country is going through, students need to better manage their money for things outside the cafeteria, like paying for gas. It would be helpful to students if all the prices were posted so they can better budget for the inflated prices outside the cafeteria.

According to Protective Life, a life insurance company, learning to budget can help teens start making financial priorities of things they need and things they can live without. This becomes a challenge when our cafeteria, which is where I usually buy my lunch, fails to give us the information that we need to make educated purchases.

You can always ask the lunch staff about how much you are paying, but that poses its own problems, like holding up the line. Let’s rethink how we are setting teens up for the real world with informed purchases in the cafeteria.