By: Jack Paradis PZ ’26

If you’re like me, your morning routine was completely turned on its head when Pitzer College’s trademark coffee shop, the Pit-Stop Café, stopped accepting meal swipes last fall. I ran out of flex money in, like, early October. To be fair, we get 160 flex dollars for the 16 meal plan, and at $6 for a bagel and a coffee, that’ll give you 26 days of breakfast. But I digress. 

I decided to channel my frustration into curiosity to answer the question we’ve all been wondering: Why did the Pit-Stop stop accepting meal swipes?

I started asking around to get to the bottom of it. I’m a sophomore myself, so I asked my sophomore friends if they knew what happened. Mostly, I got answers along the lines of; ‘Pitzer’s broke,’ ‘Pitzer hates us,’ or ‘I don’t know.’ Eventually, I asked an upperclassman about the issue, and I learned that the Pit-Stop only started accepting meal swipes during the pandemic. Realizing this story was more complex than what I had previously thought, I decided to conduct an interview with the general manager of Pitzer’s dining services, Miguel Menjivar.

Menjivar quickly explained that dining halls have specific permits to be able to offer food in exchange for meal swipes, which the Pit-Stop doesn’t. 

“Pit-Stop is not registered with the health department as a food establishment in that way,” Menjivar said. “We can do coffee there and we can do pastries. That’s it. [Meals] require a health permit.”

However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, California laws regarding dining halls were loosened, allowing Pitzer to utilize the Pit-Stop more flexibly. Menjivar explained this was in an effort to spread out students during dining hours.

“Lots of rules were not enforced [during the pandemic],” Menjivar said. “Definitely health codes were not enforced. They wanted to make sure people stayed away from each other so they allowed certain things; for us to do a certain way of service. In order to prevent people from congregating, we opened different spots for people to eat, and that was one of the things they did at the Pit-Stop.”

According to Menjivar, when California’s dining hall protocols went back to normal they had to go back to simply operating as a café.

Hopeful for some good news, I asked Menjivar if there was any way that meal swipes could return to the Pit-Stop. He explained that the answer is more complicated than what one might expect. 

“What needs to happen is that [the Pit-Stop] needs to get a health inspection, which it’s not big enough for,” Menjivar said. 

In order to qualify for inspection, a facility must have certain requirements like a three compartment sink and somewhere to prep and wash dishes. 

“It’s just too small for that,” Menjivar said. “The only way that it could happen is if the place gets expanded. If it’s a little bit bigger, then we could possibly do it.”

In short, meal swipes were only accepted at the Pit-Stop last year because California state laws became more relaxed about what constitutes a dining hall during the pandemic. California laws have reverted to their pre-COVID status, and Pit-Stop no longer meets the requirements to accept meal swipes. Additionally, because cross-5C dining was shut down during most of the 2021-22 school year, the staff wanted students to have more dining options. It also meant fewer students crowding McConnell, which was probably the place to go if you wanted to catch COVID in 2021.

Although meal swipes won’t be returning to the Pit-Stop in the near future, not all hope is lost. McConnell recently expanded their breakfast hours from 9:30-11:00 a.m to help fill that awkward gap of time in the morning. Cross-5C dining is up and running. The Pit-Stop has been updating their menu and it only costs an extra 85 cents to get oat milk in your latte. The future is bright.