Windy city college faces laundry payment predicament
27 October, 2014
category: Privilege Control
Contract changes and expirations have caused a crunch for University of Chicago students looking to top up their ID cards with laundry funds.
The University removed cash-to-card machines from residence halls at the beginning of this academic year, leaving students with just two locations at which they can reload their ID cards for laundry. Now, rather than having machines located in residence halls, the students must report to two central locations, a campus convenience store and Bartlett Hall, a highly trafficked building that contains a dining hall, and other student resources.
As reported by the Chicago Maroon, The University of Chicago’s student newspaper, the drop in card-topping locations is the result of new contracts for both library printing and the residence halls laundry services. Students had been using the cash-to-card machines to directly add funds to their IDs to pay for laundry and printing.
The new laundry contract funds two machines in lieu of the previous five, and despite the loss of the previous convenient locations, students can still use quarters as a payment alternative for laundry services.
The university is also piloting a program that accepts debit and credit card payments for laundry services. The system, called Change Point, is not a universal solution, as it’s currently limited to only some of the university’s residence halls.
According to the university’s College Housing and Residential Services, there are no plans to expand the debit/credit Change Point system or to reinstall the cash-to-card machines.
