Whether it’s tuition, books or food, it can seem students are charged just for the sake of an extra buck for the University of Massachusetts. Today, the overcharge in question concerns packaged foods on campus.
This isn’t in reference to the award-winning UMass dining services but the retail food students can buy across campus, often using extra dining dollars.
It’s the food students bring to their dorm rooms for midnight snacks. Most of this food is a complete rip-off.
I’ve worked in the food industry for years and know what many products cost. At the Harvest Café in the campus center, bottles of Zico coconut water cost $3.99. Students may not realize it, but Zico coconut water doesn’t cost $3.99 anywhere else. Zico coconut water at Stop & Shop just down the road in Hadley costs $2.69 a bottle.
Unless the school is getting a sour deal from its suppliers, it is gouging students, like an airport does after you’ve made it past security.
It’s not like UMass is a restaurant that needs to price our drinks at four or five times cost to turn a profit.
UMass charges reasonable amounts for certain items. The Deep River Chips individual serving bags cost $1.50, which is not unreasonable and is the same price my small cheese shop charges.
Why the discrepancy between fair and high prices?
It’s easy to guess.
Based on the UMass meal plan program, students can choose to buy up to $9.50 per meal for food as a replacement for a dining hall meal. That seems like a great feature of the meal plan, since students often have extra meal swipes left on their cards at the end of the semester. It’s an easy way to use those extra bucks.
My guess is that the school supports a system in which students grab an assortment of food to meet a limit of $9.50. As is human nature, they aren’t tracking the price of each individual purchase towards this limit — as they might be if buying the items on their own.
Students are throwing down an extra item at the last second to make up their dining dollar limits.
We’re being duped. It’s easier to overcharge for the trendy, semi-exotic coconut water than for a standard cheap bag of fried potatoes.
Prices of packaged food sold are so off keel that stores around campus don’t seem to know how much to charge.
At the bookstore in the Campus Center, 12-ounce “Mexican” Cokes cost $1.99. Just a stone’s throw away at the Harvest Café, the same Cokes cost $2.50.
When I order these specific Cokes for my cheese shop, buying one case at a time, they cost just under $1 each, which makes sense, because this week they were on sale at Stop & Shop for $1, and usually are $1.49.
The Chobani yogurts at the Harvest Café cost $2.79. At the Procrastination Station in the library, they are $2.59. Again, at Stop & Shop the Chobani yogurts are only $1.29. These numbers don’t make sense at all.
The list goes on. At the Harvest Café, 8-ounce bottles of High Brew coffee sell for $3.99 while at Whole Foods, they sell for $2.49.
I used to work at Whole Foods, and I know that the business is not in the habit of underpricing items.
At bottle of Iced Bhakti chai costs $5.99 at the Harvest Café, but $3.69 at River Valley Co-op in Northampton.
Both Whole Foods and River Valley serve upper-middle class to high-end clientele, yet their prices are significantly better than those at UMass.
Students are always broke. Why is it, then, that UMass feels the need to charge students more for food — a need not a luxury — than people are charged out in the rest of the world?
I used to work on Block Island, where everything cost more. After all, it was an island and all of the products had to be shipped over on a boat.
I don’t see any ocean around UMass.
Ian Hagerty is a senior journalism student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.