> It is truly an awful contract, with no benefit at all to the employer that I can see.

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.

At my institution there was a student revolt, chartwell was kicked out and it is a work co-op. The quality has increased, the employees are better treated and the cost stayed the same, and stupid rules like that are no more !

Yeah, exact same thing when I was reluctantly involved in a club’s leadership and organizing an on-campus event with food 20+ years ago. I think it was Sodexo in our case. Must be common.

Sodexo

Coca-Cola is sort of like the Apple of cola in that they're the upmarket brand almost everywhere around the globe. Unless Coke has a sales, marketing, or branding angle (see, e.g., Disney deal mentioned elsethread), they won't discount nearly as deeply as Pepsi, which is perennially in second-place at best (Mt. Dew notwithstanding). Pepsi is the obvious choice for any outlet where your customers are captive (e.g. sit-down restaurants) and you don't otherwise care about looking cheap for not offering Coca-Cola.

>shower you with coffee and donuts to much friendlier offers to get sales.

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.

> shower you with coffee and donuts to much friendlier offers to get sales.

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.