David Porter is the pioneer of creating community with Next-Gen Residential and Retail Dining crafted through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking for campus dining programs.

Take out a pencil and a piece of paper. List every business you have patronized over the past five years. Every restaurant. Every fast food drive-through. Every car dealership. Amazon. YouTube. Netflix. Your gym, your phone carrier, and almost every subscription service available. Now circle the ones that encouraged you to buy less. Not less of what you don’t need. Less, period.

Every one of them, from the dealership’s trim package to the Prime membership to the “unlimited” phone plan, is engineered to move you up the menu.

I am confident your circle will land pretty close to one entry: the campus meal plan.

Most of Your Customers Arrive Emotionally Pre-Sold at the Top of the Meal Plan Menu

Over the past thirty-six years of interviewing senior administrators on college and university campuses, especially residence life and housing directors, this consultant cannot recall many reports of parents or students “white knuckling” the decision to purchase the most expensive mandatory meal plan when completing their housing contract. Just the opposite. Most parents want the most expensive plan, the one that purports to satisfy all of their son’s or daughter’s dining and snacking needs as part of what appears to be an all-inclusive package.

This is often the first time their child will live away from home. Mom and Dad are not comparison shopping; they are buying peace of mind. The biggest meal plan is, quite literally, an expression of love.

No other industry’s customer walks in the door pre-sold on the premium package. Yet far too many campuses spend the next eight months giving that gift back.

Buy High, Buy Down, Get Off

Here is the life cycle of a mediocre or failing residential dining program. The parents buy high: Johnny arrives in August with the largest plan available and his parents’ love converted into dining dollars.

Then Johnny meets the program. The dining hall closes at 9 p.m., but it always runs out of the good stuff between 8:00 and 8:30. And to make matters worse, “the Good Stuff” is a moving target, because it changes almost every day. By November, Johnny is rationing swipes, worrying about running out of meal plan money before the end of the semester, or just plain frustrated by the limited hours, menu offerings, and payment options that restrict his access and his purchasing power.

Then comes the phone call home: “Can I use your credit card for DoorDash? Can I buy some groceries for my room, or eat off campus?”

Mom and Dad’s response is immediate: “We are spending a fortune on your meal plan. Why do you need more money?” And Johnny’s answers are ready, because every one of them is true: “The dining hall is closed. They don’t have what I want. I am running out of declining balance. I go to bed hungry at night.”

No parent on earth hears “I go to bed hungry” and says no. The card number gets read, and as the DoorDash and grocery store transactions tick up, the meal plan becomes more expensive with each day that passes, because the family is now paying twice for the same stomach. THIS is what creates the downward pressure to buy down or get off the plan entirely.

So Johnny buys down at midyear, buys the minimum as a sophomore, and gets off entirely junior year. His parents, who once insisted on the biggest plan you sold, now agree the whole thing was a rip-off. Buy high, buy down, get off.

The Industry’s Answer Is to Engineer Better Ways to Buy Down

Faced with the buy-down wave, the committee convenes and designs new, cheaper, smaller plans, essentially trying to make a less than desirable dining program more desirable by charging less for it. I have watched hundreds of administrators wrap themselves around a pole engineering more graceful ways for their customers to spend less. That is managing decline, one buy-down at a time.

It does not matter how much a meal plan costs. If the program does not fit the hours students keep, the way they eat, and the social life they want, it will feel like a rip-off at any price. Charging less makes a program cheaper, not desirable. Remember, value is emotion, and no pricing committee has ever out-argued a customer’s gut.

Do Not Misread the Spending Signals

And do not misinterpret the very misleading spending signals along the way, because a mediocre or failing program produces numbers that look exactly like success.

Two examples. Students on declining balance plans BURN through their unused balances, and retail sales go off the charts for the last week of the spring semester. Or voluntary meal plan sales skyrocket after a much smaller, less expensive plan is introduced, and non-resident students purchase it in record numbers. Some administrators read these as proof of a successful retail program or a desirable dining program. In fact, both can be symptomatic of, and can mask, a chronic systemic deficiency born of student dissatisfaction. The dashboard says you are winning. The behavior is the truth.

Honor the Expression of Love

The brass ring is not defending revenue with mandates or designing prettier off-ramps. It is a program so compelling that students voluntarily stay on and buy up, because the plan is worth it. Hard stop. I have seen juniors and seniors with full kitchens, under no mandate at all, buy full meal plans because the dining program is where their life happens.

Getting there is not a meal plan design problem. It is a SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ opportunity for growth: a program built around the Student Clock, Abundance Thinking instead of swipe-rationing and breakage games, and a dining environment with the gravitational pull of a campus living room.

Every August, parents hand your institution their trust in the form of their children, and often want to purchase the most expensive meal plan on the menu as an expression of love for the son or daughter they are about to drop off. The only question that matters is what your program does with that trust and that love. Refund them in disappointment, one buy-down at a time, or repay them with the friendships, belonging, emotional security, and daily well-being that positively influence their daily lives on your campus, and that shape the arc of their lives long after graduation, for the rest of their lives.

You are the only business in America that starts every year with customers begging to buy up. Stop begging them to buy down. This is not only solvable, it is preventable.