Ha, the University where I work signed an exclusive agreement to only sell Pepsi products on campus. I'm sure there was some kickback money given to people here to push it through.
If you want to, say, have a student group sell cookies or whatever, the provider has to approve and you have to pay to host it.
The contract is for 10 years. No freaking way somebody signed off on that without money under the table.
It is truly an awful contract, with no benefit at all to the employer that I can see. Like you, I conclude that some executive must have gotten kickbacks for signing this.
The benefit is having an operating cafeteria (i.e. an amenity) for a guaranteed period with little or zero out-of-pocket expense other than providing the space. Unless there's obviously high-demand (coffee?), no catering company is going to commit to a long-term contract without ensuring some minimum volume to maintain staffing. Anything food related typically has ridiculously slim margins on average, especially when you count all the failed projects.
Catering is often an exception, but not this kind of daily staffed in-place catering. The most profitable kind of catering is where you can prepare food offset for discrete (though hopefully recurring) events across many (hopefully repeat) clients, and where you can quickly ramp up or ramp down staffing and facilities to minimize recurring costs.
Coke used to sell their high volume customers a different syrup, and give them different equipment to pour it, that was incompatible with the low volume customers equipment, to try and stop this
Why? Is it that hard to imagine pepsi doing it in an above-board way, eg. giving a discount to the university directly?
Why is it so hard to imagine people who work in education would have flexible ethics for personal gain?
If I was working a cushy admin job, I'd need way more bribery than $5 worth of coffee and doughnuts to intentionally select a worse vendor, especially if the decision would negatively impact my colleagues and get me flak.
>Why is it so hard to imagine people who work in education would have flexible ethics for personal gain?
Because if you read the other comments, there are perfectly reasonable explanations that don't involve graft. Jumping to "bribe" every time there's bad behavior is just lazy thinking and means you don't actually figure out what the root of the problem is.
Right. I'm sure, in spite of this and the decades of overwhelming evidence, this was all just a silly coincidence, and they can lower food prices now.
Edit: I'm shitlimited to five posts per X number of hours, so I'm going to respond here: the evidence is in TFA, thanks.
Where's all this "overwhelming evidence"? So far the only that's presented is "my university is pepsi only so there must be something shady going on" and "vendors buy me coffee so there must be administrators corrupting themselves and risking their 6 figure jobs for $5 worth of inducements"
edit:
>Edit: I'm shitlimited to five posts per X number of hours, so I'm going to respond here: the evidence is in TFA, thanks.
Searches for "bribe" and "kickbacks" don't turn anything up. If you're talking about the unsealed FTC complaint, that's anti-competitive behavior, but not the "kickbacks" that OP was talking about (ie. some administrator abusing their position of trust to personally enrich themselves). Both are bad, but they're not remotely comparable. For one, in the case of kickbacks, the organization and its members are harmed (through worse contracts), whereas for whatever walmart and pepsi agreed to, both benefited.
But a lot of people are poorly paid and free coffee is nice.
It might not be enough to select a worse vendor but if two are equal it’s easy to pick the one with the cute sales representative who knows how you like your coffee.
Then there is the leadership who plays golf together and use the company card to buy gifts (booze) for the deciders.
It’s not bribery it’s just subtle influence;)
And it’s everywhere, it’s the same at the various higher education colleges I worked at.
By bringing this up in a thread talking about kickbacks, it sounds as if you're trying to equate the two. Please don't equate this to a "kickback." It's not what that is. There's real standards to what denotes bribes and kickbacks and that's not what those are.
> flexible ethics for personal gain?
If you let the donuts influence your judgment, that is an ethical problem -- I agree. But if you operate in your organization's best interest you can enjoy the coffee and donuts without remorse.
The buyer at the university could just be doing their job, signing contracts to ensure (ideally) stable vendors and a good price by signing such a long contract term.