Complaining about Leo’s is a Georgetown tradition, and not without good reason. The management of the University’s dining hall and meal system needs change. Unfortunately, the changes that have been made to Leo’s this fall were a step in the wrong direction.
Over the summer, the dining hall was rearranged and restructured. The upstairs salad and fruit bar as well as the “weekly wrap” disappeared, and bagels and muffins vanished from Late Night. These changes haven’t fundamentally altered Leo’s, but they show that Georgetown and Aramark, the food service provider for Leo’s, are not interested in making changes that improve the food quality. Given the underwhelming showing, it is clear that Georgetown needs to reconsider its contract with Aramark.
Aramark claims that every change made to Leo’s over the summer came about as a direct result of student feedback from their online Dining Styles Survey. Instead of relying on low response-rate email surveys and individual opinions, Aramark needs to engage a larger proportion of Georgetown students before making any changes. Small, week-long test runs for new dining options conducted in the dining hall itself, combined with a convienient feedback system, would ensure that changes reflect the wishes of the majority of student diners. Most importantly, Georgetown needs to encourage students to take an active role in designing their dining experience rather than simply reacting to the changes made for them by Aramark.
Aramark lacks integrity in the way it conducts business with its clients and the way it treats its employees. Despite decreasing the quality of its service, Aramark raised prices on all its meal plans this year by an average of about $35. As usual, the weekly meal plans it offers force students to choose a plan with too few or too many meals per week.
In 2008, an inspector general in Florida found that the company had pocketed over $10 million for meals it never served, and had substituted in cheaper ingredients without permission from their client, the State of Florida Prison System. Several labor unions have complained about Aramark’s poor worker compensation, including the National Labor Relations Board in Philadelphia, which recently accused Aramark of collecting union dues from its workers but not passing them on to the unions.
Georgetown University should assert itself on behalf of its students and renegotiate its contract with Aramark, demanding more reasonable meal plan options and insisting that any increase in price comes with an increase in quality, not a decrease. And if Aramark is unwilling to negotiate, the University should find a new provider.
