By Jessica Goldberg, Dan Neligh and Caroline Porter
The Downtown Devil began looking into price differences between items at the Taylor Place convenience store and items in other stores nearby several months ago, after students raised questions about how much more they were being charged at school stores.
The price information in the video piece was compiled using prices of items that were of the same brand, size, type and quantity in all stores over a period of two weeks. Sales and discounts were not taken into account—i.e., the full price of the product was used rather than the discounted price in applicable cases. The prices of over 100 items were collected from the Taylor Place convenience store and then a sample of those items was gathered from other stores to determine average price differences.
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Percent price differences between singular items at different stores were calculated by taking the cost of the item at Taylor Place, dividing it by the cost of the item at the other store, multiplying it by 100 and subtracting that number from 100 in order to produce a percentage that represents how much less an item costs at other stores than at Taylor Place. Items that cost more at other stores than at Taylor Place produce a negative value. The averages referenced in the video piece were calculated by adding all of the applicable percents and dividing by the number of values that were used in the calculation.
Six days after Aramark spokeswoman Krystal Nelson made her initial response to one of the questions asked over e-mail (how food prices at the Taylor Place convenience store and the store in the University Center are set), Nelson responded to a question about why prices at the Taylor Place convenience store were different than prices for the same items at the City Cafe in the University Center (the two sets of prices were collected on the same day).
“The prices for the convenience items at Taylor Place market are consistent with the prices for like products at City Cafe,” Nelson said in the e-mail. Nelson was then asked if this represented a recent policy change and we notified her that, based on sample information collected at both stores in the period of one day, prices were an average of 6.17 percent lower at the City Cafe than at Taylor Place’s convenience store. Nelson responded by asking for information about specific items referenced in the piece and explaining that she could not answer many of the questions because the information was proprietary.
After receiving Nelson’s e-mail, Downtown Devil reporters returned to check prices of items at the Taylor Place convenience store and the City Cafe. Some prices had been changed to levels consistent with the same items at the other store, some prices were changed in a manner that was inconsistent with prices for comparable items and most of the items remained at the same prices they had been when the Downtown Devil first checked them. Based on the new data, prices at the City Cafe remained an average of 5.13 percent lower than they were at Taylor Place’s convenience store.
Contact the reporters at news@downtowndevil.com
