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US consumer watchdog finds that school lunch fees are taking a toll on parents

Single mother Rebecca Wood, 45, was already dealing with high medical bills in 2020 when she noticed she was being charged a $2.49 “program fee” each time she loaded money onto her daughter’s school lunch account.

As more schools turn to cashless payment systems, more districts have contracted with processing companies that charge as much as $3.25 or 4% to 5% per transaction, according to a new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The report found that though legally schools must offer a fee-free option to pay by cash or check, there’s rarely transparency around it.

“It wouldn’t have been a big deal if I had hundreds of dollars to dump into her account at the beginning of the year,” Wood said. “I didn’t. I was paying as I went, which meant I was paying a fee every time. The $2.50 transaction fee was the price of a lunch. So I’d pay for six lunches, but only get five.”

thesohoriots , (edited )

That’s some JPay shit

anon6789 ,
@anon6789@lemmy.world avatar

No children here, and the article didn’t give the average price of lunch. Google tells me it’s about $3.

Not to deviate too much from the article, which seemed to focus on how school lunchrooms have adopted outside payment options that use a Ticketmaster inspired fee model, but the lunch “base price” at least is better than I had expected.

The “back in my day” price was 85 cents in the mid 80s to I believe $1.85 by the time I graduated high school in the late 90s. For it to have ok not gone up about 50% since sounds better than the price increase on many other things, especially with food prices of the last few years.

It’s cheaper than the cheapest fast food meal and much less than my cheapest meal at work, while likely being nutritionally somewhere between the 2.

Any of you with kids have a more accurate real cost of feeding kids or more stories of these odd payment schemes?

the_post_of_tom_joad ,

If you’re interested and don’t hate John Oliver he did a pretty good breakdown on school lunches that will answer these and other questions. Want me to linky? Ill just linky. (26 minutes)

anon6789 ,
@anon6789@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks!

Serinus ,

The payment scams aren’t going towards food in any way. The tradeoff you’re suggesting doesn’t exist.

anon6789 , (edited )
@anon6789@lemmy.world avatar

Oh, I didn’t mean to imply it went to the food in any way, it seems a straight processing fee because we can thing. That’s why I was surprised the list price of the lunch was only $3.

My $0.85 in 1986 converts to $2.44 and $1.85 in 1998 converts to $3.57, so if the price of lunch is around $3, that makes it seem like it has been inflation proof, at least for out of pocket cost. I’m sure property tax and state tax has subsidized it, but cost to kids/parents sounds like it’s held flat.

My cheapest equivalent meal from the work cafeteria is about $10 while only being modestly higher in quality than what i remember school lunch being like,

raederle ,

Thanks to a working state legislature, school lunches are now free in Michigan. Before that, it cost about $2.50 for a high school lunch. Kiddo needed to either take cash daily, I had to load his school account, or he packed lunch from home. He liked to eat school lunch. We are fortunate that we can afford that. If I didn’t load his account from their website, and If the account went negative too long, he wasn’t allowed school lunch.

Sending cash with him was how I handled it but it usually took him going negative and the lunch workers telling him he was negative for him to remember money in his backpack. If I loaded his account from the website, there was a “convenience fee” of $3 or $4.

2pt_perversion ,

Oh another thing on the list of things I think should just be free instead and covered by taxes.

BigMacHole ,

Free School Lunch is WOKE COMMUNISM! If you TRULY want to Protect and Save the Children you need to Hire ARMED GUNMEN to Patrol their School! That way we have Enough Money to Finance ANOTHER Billionaire’s Spaceship Hobby!

Coasting0942 ,

Most banks offer bill-payer services. Add your school into your bank system and mail them a check straight from your bank. No need for envelopes or stamps, your bank will mail it for you. You can setup a repeating schedule.

$2 for me to give you my bank account info? How about you hire another clerk to process all the paper checks you nitwits. Obviously only rich saviors running the school district if they don’t see the problem with a processing fee.

iamdisillusioned ,

This sounds like the schools don’t handle the payments for lunches. A third party does and as an electronic payment processor, they probably don’t provide a physical address where a check can be received.

NABDad ,

I didn’t have the option to have my bank send it in, but I printed a check for each kid each month to cover school lunch costs. I don’t know what it cost them to process the checks, but it wasn’t all that inconvenient for me to do. If there had been a no-cost way to load funds online I would have done it, but it wouldn’t have been much more convenient for me. I’m not going to pay extra to make it easier for them.

nehal3m ,

Ah yeah, pay money to pay money. That’s not a grift at all!

kata1yst ,

Not here in Minnesota. Thanks Mr. Walz!

nokturne213 ,

Free lunch here in NM too.

NineMileTower ,

Same in MI. BIG GRETCH!

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