Watching One Hit Wonders on MuchMusic. The current song is No Means No by Ricky J. While, now that I have been “laid-off” aka fired by the University Food Services for doing my job as floor rep, I feel that I am free to talk about the problems with food services. I spoke up as part of my role in residence. I am floor rep and the people on my floor were tired of being ripped off. I checked that it was acceptable for me to be part of the committee and speak. My floor had discover that while we pay for 12 meals a week at 7.35 per meal, we are only given 11 meals a week and people who eat 12 a week are unable to eat for the last 2 or 3 days of the month without paying more. This all means that in reality we are being ripped off and paying 8.02 per meal despite the fact that we all signed contracts at a lower rate. Furthermore, Aramark has constantly recycled food and cuts back the amount of and variety of fresh fruits and vegatables. Furthermore, Aramark was complaining that it cost them 1200 dollars to hold a Chicken Finger dinner that had about 700 people paying on average 7 dollars each to eat this meal. This means that they made about 4900 dollars – expenses of 1200 dollars = 3700 dollars. I will assume that they have overhead of 20% which means that they only profited 2900 dollars for this meal. How horrible for them. They were only able to get a profit of $4.22 out of each student. I will assume that Aramark has been making $4.00 profit each meal I was forced to eat of their horrible food. This means that poor Aramark as only been able to extract $900 dollars out of me in pure profit this term. How sad for them. Taking that 900 dollar profit from me and taking that into the 550 students that are forced to eat Pembina Hall food everyday, this means that Aramark was only able to extract $495,000 dollars in profit from the Students for the first term. (this does not include the high profits from about another 400 students forced to pay more for food at other locations or the extra students from AVM residence that have “flex” plans.) This means for the year that Aramark is guaranteed a cool million dollar profit out of 550 people. I feel really sorry for my fellow residences who are stuck in Tache/Speechly for second term. With the strike that will occur starting Jan 12, they are going to be exploited even more. The student who are paying for 17 meals a week (only really getting 16 a week) or 19 meals a week (only really getting 18 meals a week) are required to pay for those meals despite the fact that Aramark will only serve 2 meals a day with a very limited often recycled menu. The strike is good for Aramark as they do not loss business, will not have to pay as much labour, will have an excuse to cut down on meal allotment and do not have to serve meals that people are forced to pay for. What a mess! What a rip-off!