Students faced long lines in the dining halls, Rambler Room and other dining areas on campus during the first two weeks of the semester due to the installation of a new cash register system.

New registers have been added to all dining locations on both campuses that take Rambler Bucks, including the dining halls, other dining areas such as Terry Food Court, Damen Express, Union Station and vending machines.

The switch is part of the replacement of the current campus card transaction system.

Loyola is aiming to have all campus services, including dining, parking, laundry, buying books and printing in campus computer labs on one card, said Doug Stenfeldt, the director of operations for Loyola’s dining services.

However, during the adjustment time, students are enduring lengthy lines and slow transactions.

Junior Ashley Slovinski has noticed this problem at Market 820.

“The system is so slow,” she said, “and they have trouble with it all the time. They usually have to swipe my card four times to get it to go through.”

The long lines and slow check-outs should be over soon, if they aren’t already in some locations, according to Stenfeldt.

The delays were likely due to the “adjustment period needed for familiarity with the new system,” Stenfeldt said. By now, all dining services employees have been trained on the system, and Stenfeldt said they have caught on quickly.

In addition, the new cash registers have a function that the old ones did not that will make checking out easier.

“The new system utilizes barcodes on nearly everything which speeds up the time and accuracy of transactions,” Stenfeldt said.

Rambler Room is one exception to this because many of the items do not have barcodes. because of this, transactions have taken longer there because “it took [the employees] a little while to learn where all the keys are,” Stenfeldt said.

Dining services is working to adjust the keyboards on the registers there to make transactions as fast and as easy as they are in the other locations.

Loyola is also looking into adding cash registers in areas that get the most traffic, according to Stenfeldt.

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New cash registers cause backups