College Canteen Demand and Pricing Study

Added Jul 2026 3 design docs

Every college canteen runs on guesswork. The contractor raises the samosa from 15 to 20 rupees, sales dip for a fortnight, and nobody can say whether the loss in volume was worth the gain in margin, because no one has ever drawn a demand curve for a samosa. Students grumble that the cold coffee is overpriced while the thali sells out by half past one, and the two facts are treated as unrelated complaints rather than as evidence about how price-sensitive each item really is. It is the closest thing a first-year economics student has to a laboratory.

The intern turns that laboratory into a study. A short price-ladder questionnaire built in google-forms asks at least 120 students across two campus canteens how many units of five named items they would buy in a week at four different prices, producing demand schedules that are then converted in excel into arc elasticities, revenue curves and a revenue-maximising price for each item. A three-day footfall and queue count adds observed behaviour beside the stated answers, and the results become a chart pack, a six-page pricing memo, a proposed menu card designed in canva and a ten-slide deck for the canteen management.

Completing the project takes the intern from textbook demand theory to a defensible pricing recommendation: writing survey questions that do not lead the respondent, building schedules from raw responses, computing elasticity with the midpoint formula, spotting where stated intentions and observed queues disagree, and presenting a price change to someone whose income depends on it. Market research firms, pricing and revenue teams, FMCG management trainee programmes and consulting analysts all interview for exactly this reasoning, and the public repository shows the intern doing it on real data.

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