Is Sodexho Making the Cut?

In a recent survey conducted by my partner and myself for Business Statistics class in the winter semester of 2011, tried to determine if a larger amount of options for spending munch money would benefit students. In order to determine this we surveyed 57 Kalamazoo College students on their satisfaction, expenditures, and overall interest in having more options for spending. The results of this survey were quite interesting. We found that the overall satisfaction with the amount of options for students to spend their munch money was about 6.1 on a scale of 1 - 10 (1 being extremely unsatisfied and 10 being extremely satisfied). This is not an extremely low number, however we felt that there was definitely room for employment. We also found that on average a student spends $61.23 on food at places that do not accept munch money. The interesting part about this fact is that the overall satisfaction is highly related to the amount of money spent on food, when the satisfaction level raises by 1.0 students will spend almost $6 less. If the school was able to raise the level of satisfaction students would have to spend less of their own money on food. We think that an easy way to increase the level of satisfaction would be to increase the options in where students could spend their money. This would also help to solve the problem of students spending their own money on food. We asked students about four places that they could possible be interested in using their munch money and found that Jimmy John's and Munchie Mart would both be places where students were likely to spend their money. On a scale of 1 - 10 ( 1 very unlikely and 10 very likely) Jimmy John's had a 7.3 and Munchie Mart had 7.8. This means that the average student, given the option, would be 73% likely to spend their money at Jimmy John's and 78% likely to spend their money at Munchie Mart. If Sodexho was able to open this option up, students would not be the only ones to benefit. Local businesses would also be able to benefit from this change in policy. Overall, we think that by Sodexho increasing the options for students could be beneficial for the community as a whole.