Here’s a fun one from my dude Jacky Coyne ’13, along with Chris Lee ’13 and Kieran Coyne ’16. Annoyed by the inflated Weshop price of Jack and Chris’ beloved Frosted Flakes, the boys hop over to Price Chopper to see if they can do better with an assortment of groceries. The results may or may not surprise you.
Check out the sweet video above, featuring the instrumental from Clique and a guest text message from El Presidente Roth. Exciting stuff.
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who cares we’re all rich
Keep in mind that each point is worth approximately two dollars (7k/yr for meal plan, 3.5k points for the whole year if you choose the plan with only points), so WesShop, and all campus dining involving points for that matter, is insanely expensive.
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Whether you are on financial aid or not, when the semester starts you
have points, someones paid for them, and they are non-refundable. Its a
sunk cost. Assuming you have enough points and what you want to buy is
available in both places like in this video,
Cost of Weshop
$1629.00 for meal plan
$0 for snacks and stuff
Short walk back and forth OR short car ride + gas.
Whatever personal value you have with shopping at weshop
Cost of Price Chopper
$1629.00 for meal plan
$20.01 for snacks and stuff
Long walk back and forth OR short car ride + gas.
Whatever personal value you have with shopping at price chopper
Whether
you shop at weshop or price chopper, you arent getting that $1629.00
back. However when shopping at weshop you to get stuff at a much reduced
money cost ($0 lol) compared to price chopper and takes slightly less time. This is all ignoring any personal reason you have for shopping at weshop or pc. Personally I dont strongly prefer one over the other and almost never require stuff not in weshop, so I will keep shopping at weshop. That is the more efficient option for me.
Things change when you run out of points or if weshop doesnt have the good.
When weshop doesnt have what you want at the moment but price chopper
does:
Cost of Weshop
$1629.00 for meal plan
A few days of waiting if you can special order it, nevermind this comparison if you cant.
$0 for the good.
Short walk back and forth OR short car ride + gas
Cost of Price Chopper:
$1629.00 for meal plan
No waiting
$[price] for the thing.
Longer walk back and forth OR short car ride + gas
You make the decision based on your needs.
When you are out of points:
Cost of Weshop:
$1629.00 for meal plan
$24.63 for snacks
Short walk blah blah
Cost of Price Chopper:
$1629.00 for meal plan
$20.01 for snacks
Longer walk blah blah
In this case, weshop is only better if you are willing to pay 4.63 extra dollars for a shorter distance.
Im no financial analyst or econ major so if there is a critical mistake somewhere here please feel free to destroy my reasoning
Cheezits Snack Mix costs 5.89. Five. Eighty. Nine. Ive never seen that shit anywhere else for more than like 3.50. And I would know, cus i fuckin love Cheezits Snack Mix.
Bon Appetit operates at a loss; the university subsidizes them. Large contributors to this are student behavior like stealing dishware from Usdan stealing food from Usdan, Summerfields, and Weshop. This is a good conversation to have, but it is much more nuanced than this.
The real problem is that Weshop doesn’t offer generic brand alternatives like you find at a grocery store. Additionally, you are forced to buy the meal plan, so they dont care if their prices are outrageous, because you’ve already paid into everything.
i am 23% too drunk to drive to price chopper
Okay, but Weshop is not a large chain and so does not get bulk deals from food companies. Besides, they do not have to price competitively, because they take points. I’d much rather spend Monopoly money than real money. And cooking food you buy at Weshop is still more cost effective than going to WesWings (but I don’t blame swings for their high prices either, because with Bon Appetit signed on as official caterer, any other vendor–so swings, R&B, and S&C–have to pay Bon Appetit a huge cut of their profits. This is why Espwesso doesn’t sell food and only operates at hours when Pi and Usdan Cafe are closed: this way they aren’t seen as a competitor and they don’t have to pay the cut).
I’m almost positive that that last point is not true I don’t know where that information is coming from.
All vendors, including Bon Appetit, actually pay a percentage of their points income to the University. The university monitors each vendor’s points account and pays the vendor their balance on a regularly scheduled basis, but charges a percentage of the points as essentially a processing fee. Vendors each pay different percentages of their points income depending on the university’s individual contract with the vendor.
Wes Wings and Red & Black do not pay Bon Appetit anything. Our contract is with Wesleyan. We do pay Wesleyan a fee that is based on a percentage of sales.
Sorry, someone random told me that a year ago. Guess I was wrong. But what the below commenter was saying actually does give another reason why Weshop is so expensive–they are paying the university in addition to paying the vendors.
we all know wesshop is overpriced; the real investigation is to find out
for what we are paying more and where the profit is going.ing.
points are not equivalent to dollars, so actually Weshop is even more expensive. One point is worth more than one $
amount you save goes towards gas for shopping at price chopper…?
lol, gas for shopping at price chopper? The bloody store is like 5 blocks away.
So WeShop costs 23% more fake money than Price Chopper does real money.
Points =/= fake money. Unless you’re on a lot of financial aid, your parents pay real money for your points.
But it has already been included in your cost of attendance.