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Editorial: Changes made, changes needed

Changes made to auxiliary services have helped clear confusion, but there is still more to be done.

IC Editorial Board

What is Auxiliary Services? It’s where the University of Toledo puts all the student services that don’t have a home, like the student ID card, dining services and the copy center.

To be blunt, Auxiliary Services is a tangled ball of yarn that has only recently begun to unravel.

One strand that tied up a lot of resources was Dining Services. Those involved with re-organizing the mass of strings decided it would be better to separate it completely, making all things food-related their own entity.

Not only is it separated, but someone new is in charge of it. Mario Toussaint — senior director of operations for dining, retail and clinical nutrition services — has been asked to focus all his time and energy solely on dining.

He seems to be on top of things; his department has made a lot of adjustments based on student feedback, like adding a couple of meal plans to give students more options, and extending dining hall and restaurant hours to better fit students’ needs.

This is good. Dining wasn’t getting as much attention as it deserved when it had to compete with everything else in Auxiliary Services.

Parking was another string in the Auxiliary Services mess that is now completely detached.

Previously, students would be unsure of where to go for any issues with parking because it was split between two offices. Auxiliary Services had half; UTPD had the rest. ‘Divide and conquer ’ in this instance, did not work.

UTPD eased some of the confusion by moving all aspects of parking under its supervision.

This, too, creates clarity and a better allocation of resources for both Auxiliary Services and UTPD.

What’s left over is a more neatly wound bundle of services available to students.

And yet, they can do better.

There are still knots in the yarn ball — little kinks that get in the way and make the student experience more difficult than it should be.

One such knot is the copy center. In addition to not being advertised to students all that well, both students and editors on staff have described it as difficult to use and expensive.

The new technology center is another snarl that could use some work to untangle. It appears to have low traffic, possibly because students feel the products available are overpriced, despite the center’s assurance that the prices there are lower than at Best Buy.

Intrigued by this statement, we looked through Best Buy’s website to compare the prices of a laptop, a printer and a tablet. Our search showed that the tech center prices were not always better.

The Macbook Pro 15.4” laptop is currently on sale at the technology center at about $100 less than the regular price, which is only 99 cents cheaper than at Best Buy. Great.

The HP OfficeJet 6600 e-All-in-One printer, on the other hand, was the same price in Best Buy as it was here.

And then the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet — $100 cheaper at Best Buy.

Clearly, the “better than Best Buy” prices sales pitch isn’t the most accurate. Most college students don’t have the extra $100 to spend. If an administrator says the prices are lower than Best Buy, it should be so.

So progress is apparent, but there is still some work to do. We hope to see the copy center cater more to student orgs, and we would like every price at the technology center to truly be the best buy.

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