The price of the actual coke is a high percentage of the price you pay when you’re buying a can in a supermarket (it’s fully loaded with transportation/trucking costs, package, etc.) The price of the actual coke is a small percentage of the price you pay when you order a coke in a restaurant. Because the restaurant needs to pay someone to serve it to you, wash the glass, mop the floor if you spill some, absorb the breakage since about 1% of the glasses end up getting cracked or broken during a quarter, PLUS clean the bathroom if you use it after drinking your coke.
Got it? Doesn’t matter if it’s in NYC or rural Nebraska.
yeah supermarkets have tons of spoilage,employees,rent,need to clean bathrooms,mop the floors etc etc…so your added expenses you think restaurants have are not really relevant because they both have them…(restaurants charge more because they can) it was a simple point not in need of a absurd break down . I guess my point was missed. it is the same can of coke wherever you get it and or drink it… do you want to pay all the extra money for it ? I need to remember to be extremely literal…yeah I got it my bad .
I get your point- and having worked in both restaurants and supermarkets I understand the cost structure of both…
However- education is not a generic, high quality control product like a can of coke.
There are public colleges in my state which do not offer the same 'product" or experience as some of the high priced privates. And there are private colleges-- of course- which are no better than and in many cases inferior to the public flagship.
So I don’t understand the applicability of your analogy.
Zobroward: your point would be better made by comparing paying 50 cents for a coke in a supermarket in Huntsville vs $1.50 for the same can of coke in the upscale market down the road. The soda is the same, so is it better if it purchased at the upscale market? Some people would not shop at the supermarket where the soda is 50 cents, because they believe it is beneath them. So yes, they are paying more for the same product.
If you think about the cost of eating in a restaurant vs eating at home, you would never eat out. It is the experience you are paying for and having someone else do the work.
In many cases, especially families on CC, they are not looking for the 50 cent soda, but also not the $6.95 soda. The 50 cent soda is living at home and going to the local CC. That is a completely different experience than a residential college. They are willing to go to the restaurant where the coke costs a $1.99 (or maybe $2.99) or looking for the college to provide a discount from $6.95 to $3.
It’s a classic case of reducing cognitive dissonance to think that if it costs more, it must be worth more (same with selectivity). You can even sell more goods if you raise their price. UChicago was able to attract more applicants just by driving up the number of applicants and therefore the US News ranking. Same school it’s always been, though now with a more competitive (in both senses of the word) clientele, which may itself alter its desirability.
Actual study–Does a pill work better if it costs more? This was done with EXACTLY the same pill. Tried it with antibiotics and pain medication. The answer is yes. The higher cost made a difference in the efficacy of the drug. Chalk it up to the placebo effect but it made a huge difference.
So I would guess that the 7 dollar can of soda tastes better than the 50 cent one for a good number of people.
That reminds me of when polenta became a “thing” at many restaurants – yummy, but they were still grits and generally not any more special than the shrimp and grits at the local meat-and-three. Cracked me up that my late husband (born in CA, college at Stanford, J.D. at Chicago) would never touch grits (or most other classic southern dishes, even though we lived in GA at the time), but came home from a business dinner raving about the polenta.
“Chicago was able to attract more applicants just by driving up the number of applicants and therefore the US News ranking.”
Except the acceptance rate only counts for 1.5% of the USN ranking. So no, jacking up applicants doesn’t really jack up the ranking but nice try!
BTW no college comes into your bedroom and holds a gun to your head. People apply of their own free will because they find something in the college appealing. So increased applications are genuine.
Personally, I’m not a fan of either grits or polenta (despite loving both good Southern cooking and good Italian), so that makes sense if they are the same thing.
Not going to get into the apples vs applesauce debate above, but NYU being more affordable than Wisconsin is very strange. Not that it’s impossible for that to happen… it’s just really weird to see NYU being the more financially sound option.
In [2000, Ursinus College raised](In Tuition Game, Popularity Rises With Price - The New York Times)its sticker price tuition and fees by 17.6% and saw 200 more applications. It also increased aid, primarily merit, by 20%, but applicants likely did not know that the school would give more aid (this was well before the deployment of the Net Price Calculator). I don’t know if the same tactic would work today given how widely known the student loan problem is, and how expensive colleges are, but there is at least one college for which a higher sticker price did make it appear better in the eyes of applicants.