W ith the university’s version of Cingular Wireless’ rollover pending within Dining Services, many residents are quick to jump on the bandwagon. What many students don’t see is with each Residence Halls Association and Dining Services meal plan amendment, a very large, and quite often neglected, portion of the student body suffers.
Last year it was increasing focus date options, and now it’s proposing a meal plan rollover from fall to spring semester. Has the campus lost its sense of camaraderie and empathy? Many commuters, overeaters and non-mealplanners will be facing their apocalypses if this new option passes. It will mark the death of me, the Mooch.
The Mooch used to be firmly entrenched in everyone’s meal plan budgeting. He was a necessary evil.
To describe the Mooch is almost embarrassing. He was typically male and more “well-fed” than most defensive tackles. He always made nice with his hallmates at the semester’s start to ensure a future score.
The Mooch had no reservations about the amount spent on your meal plan, either. In desperate situations, such as the inability to find a known supplier or being deemed by the donor as a Mooch abuser, he would stoop as low as asking the girl in front of him to pay for him, claiming, “Damn, I left my card in my room.”
Although highly debated, most residents would agree the Mooch’s two favorite phrases were, “Dude, lets get late night,” or “Oh man, the diner’s milkshakes are soooo good.” The Mooch could be caught smuggling five-gallon vats of the Dairy’s ice cream around focus dates.
A crafty Mooch could make you feel good about it with rants about “not letting the man take your meal points.” A successful Mooch was your gambler type, counting who they mooched off and how much they had mooched in the past. Despite this diligence, everyone still knew they were a Mooch and the Mooch was OK with that. It worked well: The Mooch asked for food, their friend sighed. Soon enough, the card was swiped and the donor had lost twice their planned meal points.
This situation is known as “market equilibrium” around Tydings Hall. However, the proposed changes would hurt the meal point economy as much as rising energy costs this winter. Here’s how:
The supply curve of meal points would shift to the left, leaving a higher price and lower quantity available at the new market equilibrium for the Mooch. This leaves the consuming Mooch at a lower satisfaction (or as us econ geeks say, a lower indifference curve level).
It hurts the person supplying the Mooch as well. Because the price of the exchange increases, it implies the Mooch will need to press and persuade the supplier harder. This could strain their friendship and lead to an ultimate disintegration of the relationship, referred to as “deadweight loss.” The friend may consider it “deadbeat loss,” but either way, it sounds imposing.
While the brief ECON 200 review may have given you a headache and a terrible flashback to Tydings 0130, the implications are simple. Both the Mooch and the supplier lose, resulting in an overall drop in student body morale.
Who can take an exam or even, God forbid, sit in their dorm room playing the new Tiger Woods video game without some Diner food? You can’t honestly expect the run-of-the-mill college student to break down and use their parents’ credit card to pay for late night. Who actually wants to pay for undercooked mozzarella sticks, anyway?
But it seems the Mooch may finally be meeting his maker. And so it goes, the death of the Mooch will just be another lost campus tradition. Sure, you were constrained to salads at the end of the semester, but hey, they were helping you. That’s all gone now, so for one last time, I will ask, “Late night?”
Andrew Appler is a senior economics major. He can be reached at Andrew_Appler@msn.com.
