COLUMN: F&H should be more open, consistent with food prices

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by Corey Pie

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Usually the focus of countless jokes and complaints about food.

I'm not writing about CK to complain about the taste of the food or its nutritional quality. That all depends on your point of view. Personally, I don't have much of a problem with either.

I'm not really complaining about the price of the food, but rather the way we are charged for the food. We walk into the kitchen and see the price list, which has sodas for 35 cents. Is that price the total amount we're paying for the soda?

No. Food and Housing has this interesting concept called a "Base Cost."

According to the Spring '95 numbers, the base cost accounts for 49 to 65.7 percent of your meal plan cost.

This stuff better be important, as most of us are spending more than half of our money on it.

According to F&H, "Base Cost -- Covers all the overhead cost, utilities, equipment, dish maintenance, and labor costs for the normal operating schedules."

Well, why isn't that just included in the price?

Have you ever gone to McDonald's and bought a burger? Probably. Has McDonald's ever sent you a bill later in the mail saying: "The price you paid in the store was just for the food. We didn't account for workers, the cost of running the kitchen and such, so we need another $2 from you to cover it"?

That's absurd. When they priced the food, all of these costs were accounted for. If this were not the case, customers wouldn't see how much the burger is actually costing them.

That's exactly the problem here. We see the prices that F&H puts up on the wall for the food, but that doesn't include more than half the money you're actually going to have to pay for the food.

If we include the "Base Cost" with the price of the food, like every other food service I've eaten at does, the result is surprising. You have to multiply CK's price by a factor of 2.0 to 2.9 (depending on the meal plan you're on).

That means that the soda we were talking about for 35 cents actually costs us between 70 cents and $1.

This doesn't seem like much money, but that 35 cents did seem like a pretty good deal before. Now it's not looking so good. The whole policy is comparable to a sales tax of between 100 and 190 percent.

The big problems come when you're talking about bigger things like a dinner. The price CK gives for a dinner is $2.90. This means we actually pay between $5.68 and $8.41! That's a serious difference.

There's also this question: Why are people paying different prices for the same food according to these corrections? It must be a bulk rate so that people who buy a larger plan pay less per item, right? Not necessarily.

According to the F&H Spring '95 figures, if you're buying an OC meal plan, the bigger the plan, the more you pay per item.(These larger meal plans have a higher percentage of money going toward base cost than the smaller OC meal plans.)

I have yet to hear a logical reason behind this "Base Cost." Why isn't their pricing reflective of the total cost?

As far as I can see, the whole system was set up as a blatant attempt to deceive the Rice student and/or his(or her) parents into believing that CK is a good deal.

Regardless of what you think of the dinners here, I know nobody who thinks that they're worth up to $8.41.

I think F&H saw this, and I believe they disguised the cost of the food to stop the pour of complaints from coming in.

I'm not saying they need to lower their prices, or that they can lower their prices since I don't know all of their costs.

I am saying that they need to be straightforward with students and parents and should show them what they're paying for.

* Figures cited from the meal plan form for Spring Semester 1995

Corey Pié is a Sid Richardson College sophomore.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the September 1, 1995 issue.

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