Everybody knows about the daily fryer special; Union Station’s rotating selection of fried foods, which provides a small reprieve from the static choices in the typical menu. Many of their options are comfort food classics such as mozzarella sticks, pizza bites, and chicken tenders, but some may have noticed that there is a stark difference between the options offered on weekdays and those offered on Friday and Saturday. Fried zucchini and cauliflower bites are not exactly the greasy junk food college students crave. But for some reason Union Station places these two foods, which are the opposite of what one might want on the weekend. These are Wednesday foods at best and Monday foods at worst. Nobody walks into Union Station on a late Friday night craving fried zucchini. When you’ve got swipes to burn, you want mozzarella sticks or chicken tenders, not fried cauliflower, which is just regular cauliflower with a new greasy skin. 

There’s only so many fryers, and the end of the week is the busiest as people try to burn their extra swipes. So perhaps these less popular items are taking up the prime time spot for a calculated reason: to discourage people from ordering the special to lighten the load on busy nights. This could be a reasonable justification for why these items have the prime spot, but it’s not as if students aren’t paying for all this. Freshman students are forced to choose between the Any 21 and Any 15 + Sushi meal plans, which for some reason cost the same, implying that four refrigerated sushis are worth six meal swipes. Almost everyone is left with extra swipes at the end of the week, meaning they’re essentially throwing their money into a firepit at the end of every Saturday. Why not let students at least use a few of the swipes being thrown away at the end of the week on foods they actually crave?