Chartwells, Pace’s dining services provider, is taking advantage of us, and the worst part is we seemingly have no choice but to take it.

You see, the way that our system is set up provides a perfect environment for price gouging, which occurs when a seller sets a price above the market price because there are no alternative options.

If you read that and thought, “This sounds awfully similar to a monopoly,” you are correct. It’s simple economics. Students are forced by the administration to buy a meal plan, and Chartwells is the only option for students to use their meal money on, so Chartwells, in effect, is a monopoly.

Chartwells understands this, and instead of doing the ethically right thing by refraining from taking advantage of college students, they drastically increase the prices of almost all the goods they sell.

I understand that the purpose of a for-profit business is to make as much money as possible, but this is outrageous. How outrageous? How about $8.59 for a 10.5oz box of Frosted Flakes, or $2.99 for one roll of Scott’s toilet paper?

The numbers by themselves do not tell the whole story. To see just how abusive the prices set by Chartwells are, I visited the local ShopRite in Thornwood, six minutes away from Pace. With the prices from the Briarcliff cafeteria in hand, I strolled through the aisles of ShopRite—which already marks up its prices to make a profit—and compiled a list of prices.

That same 10.5oz box of Frosted Flakes was $3.39, and that same roll of Scott’s toilette paper was $1.19. It was worse than I had imagined. Overall, I found that all of the products sold by Chartwells were marked up significantly higher than that of ShopRite (refer to table).

I wonder why they don’t post these comparisons at the Café?

As if marking up their prices wasn’t enough, Chartwells is inconsistent. There is a discrepancy in prices between the Westchester campuses and the New York City campus. For example, a Naked juice that is priced at $2.99 at the NYC campus, costs $5.99 at Pleasantville and Briarcliff. How does this make any sense? Why is there such a discrepancy?

Unfortunately, Chartwells is not the only culprit. Pace holds just as much, if not more, responsibility. They have allowed students to be taken advantage of, and that is not acceptable.