Pomona College’s Coop Store permanently lowered its food and beverage prices by 20 percent, Pomona Dean of Students Josh Eisenberg announced on Oct. 10. Coop Store manager Brenda Schmit and the ASPC implemented this price cut to encourage more student consumption on campus.
The Coop Store, which operates like a grocery store on one side and sells Pomona merchandise on the other, is run by ASPC. All of the profits go towards the ASPC budget, according to Eisenberg. He hopes that the recent price cut will encourage students to buy more food and drink items at the Coop Store.
“We’ve had students before who would go all the way up to [Harvey Mudd College] or [Claremont McKenna College] to go buy things because they were cheaper,” Eisenberg said. “We’re hoping that bringing the price down makes sure the money returns to the student experience.”
Pomona-branded clothing and other merchandise sold at the Coop Store are not included in the price cut. However, Eisenberg noted that, as of this year, the Coop Store will start doing more sales on these items.
“Before, we literally had the one one-day sale,” Eisenberg said. “We’ve tried to do more discounts — we did a rivalry weekend discount, we have a family weekend discount coming up.”
So far, the discounts have proven effective. The rivalry weekend sale, which offered students a 20 percent discount, brought in three times more revenue than it did on the same day in the past three years, said ASPC Vice President of Finance Daysi Manrique PO ’24.
Increasing the frequency of Coop Store sales is not just about making more money, however. Selling more Pomona merchandise was a part of this year’s ASPC platform.
“One of the things that ASPC and Timi Adelakun [PO ’24], the president, has really pushed is creating a more team spirit feel on the campus,” Eisenberg said. “It also gets more branded stuff out.”
Manrique agreed, noting that this was a goal shared by many members of ASPC and that ensuring that students could afford food and merchandise on campus would contribute to school spirit.