Brett James was famished. His insides grumbled. An 8 a.m. class and 25-minute drive from Lakeland had caused him to skip breakfast, and now he was facing the aftermath. With an engineering exam just an hour away, James knew he needed food in his stomach.
The question, though, was what? There was no time to make the trip back to Lakeland, and a tight budget made him hesitant to eat out. He had no choice but to eat on campus. But there was a wrinkle there too. As the semester had progressed, James’ dining dollars had quickly dwindled. Now he was at zero.
“I ran out in the past couple of weeks,” said the University of Memphis junior mechanical engineering major.
James is one of countless U of M students who have found themselves burning through their dining dollars. Some of them attribute this quick decrease in funds to the campus’s high food prices.
“You get jipped,” said Tiara Jenkins, a U of M sophomore MIS major who ran out of dining dollars three weeks into the semester. “They should lower the prices of food on campus.”
Blake Wiseman, a U of M business major, said the University should “make food cost less” so that dining dollars could last longer into the semester.
“That way you don’t run out the first week of October,” Wiseman said,
Aramark, a multi-billion dollar company that provides food services to more than 400 universities nation-wide, manages the U of M’s campus food services. In its partnership with U of M, Aramark manages and operates all dining options on campus, with the exception of Starbucks.
One dining option that students have found to be particularly expensive is the campus P.O.D. (Provisions on Demand) markets. In a survey of 100 random students conducted by The Daily Helmsman, 84 of them said they consider the food in the P.O.D. to be overpriced.
“[The P.O.D.’s] are ridiculously overpriced,” said Carl Thompson, a U of M sophomore and mechanical engineering major. “I can go anywhere and get something cheaper.”
These markets, Aramark’s grab-and-go concept, were “designed to meet the demand of students looking for fresh, healthy and convenient dining options,” said Matthew Perry, Aramark’s marketing manager.
Having inserted 130 of them in universities all over the country, they’ve created five P.O.D. pillars, which Perry said uphold their standards. One of these is the “Demand Fair Pricing” pillar. It states the following:
Among P.O.D.’s five pillars, one reads, “We spend time helping you spend less. P.O.D. is always working to ensure that our prices are comparable to competitors’ everyday prices. That means we’re looking out for you and your budget.”
The Daily Helmsman compared the campus P.O.D.’s prices to those of a local competitor, Kroger. The charts below give a few examples of the price differences.
Perry said that Aramark considers convenience stores, not grocery stores, to be their competitors.
“Our direct store delivery products, such as bottled beverages, chips, candy, sandwiches, etc. are competitive with the products sold in convenience stores,” he said. “We are not competitive with large grocery or discount stores that have their own distribution locations and can buy in large quantities for volume discounts.”
U of M junior studio art major T.J. Hardaway agrees with Perry.
“Based off of what I’ve seen, I understand the need to make profit,” he said. “Most of the people who think it’s overpriced are probably the ones buying naked juice.
But not all students are buying Aramark’s response.
“You can’t just compete with convenience stores in general because you’re catering to a different target audience,” James said. “Convenience stores target anyone who stop to get gas on the go. This is a college campus where not many are wealthy — and all of these people are using their dining dollars.”
