The new option will include the dining hall and reinstate an earlier policy of carrying balances from fall to spring semester. It will not cost 70 percent of the traditional 20-meal plan, as a comparison of the number of meals might suggest, but more than 91 percent. The reasons for the pricing scheme, Fiskeaux explained, come from the fact that all of the costs involved in running a cafeteria are not dependent on the number of meals served. Based only on amounts of food, it would in fact cost 70 percent as much to feed someone 14 times as it would to feed someone 20 times. However, the food is only part of the cost of operating the cafeteria.
Many costs occur more or less independently of how often people eat.
For example, labor costs for full-time cafeteria employees, much of student labor, office expenses, building maintenance and the replacement of kitchen equipment generate virtually the same costs whether students eat 14 times a week or 20. Because the cafeteria is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the fixed costs will be divided more or less evenly among the various meal plans regardless of whether students eat three meals a day or only one. Any plan, practically speaking, costs less than paying for meals at the door. Pioneer, which was started in 1973, serves only small Christian colleges and universities and provides a wide variety of services to different schools. It's just negotiating the price.