Pitt's Weekly 14, priced per meal

Two different purchases, listed as tiers

Pitt sells its meal memberships on one page, in one list, ordered by price. That makes them look like a single product in several sizes. They are not. One kind gives you an allowance of meals every week. The other gives you a block of meals for the whole semester, to spend at whatever pace you like.

The difference is what happens to a meal you did not eat. A weekly allowance resets. Miss a week and that week's meals are gone, because nothing carries from one week to the next. A block does not reset, so a meal you skip in October is still yours in November, up to the daily limit the membership sets.

What each membership costs per meal

Every membership on the list bundles dining dollars into its price. Divide the whole price by the meals and you charge the meals for money that was never spent on them. Take the dining dollars out first, then divide. That is the figure below.

Read it as a ranking rather than as a price list. The bar is what one meal works out to on that membership, cheapest at the top, and the cheapest meal does not have to sit on the cheapest membership. The lighter figure beside each bar is the answer you get without taking the dining dollars out, which is the number most people arrive at.

The one count Pitt does not publish

The weekly membership needs a semester total before it can be compared to a block at all, and Pitt does not print one.

The semester count used for the weekly membership is derived, not published. It is the weekly allowance multiplied by the number of weeks Pitt's own housing contract calls typical for a term. Because the allowance does not carry from week to week, nobody can actually reach that total, which makes it an upper bound on the meals and its per meal figure a floor rather than a promise. Every other count on this page is a number the school publishes.

So the weekly membership is flattered by the comparison, not penalised by it. If it still does not look cheap per meal against a block, that answer holds.

The whole catalog, side by side

Every membership with a meal count, the price it is sold at, the dining dollars bundled into that price, and the per meal figure that is left.

Pitt also sells memberships that are dining dollars and nothing else. They are not in the table, because money has no cost per meal, and putting them in a per meal ranking would invent a figure to sort them by.

What is left at the end of the term

The two halves of a membership end differently. Block meals expire with the semester and do not roll into spring. Dining dollars do roll, under the same membership or a higher one, and they are forfeited at the end of the spring term instead.

That is worth holding next to the table above. The part of the price that buys meals is the part with the earlier deadline, and on the memberships that bundle the most dining dollars it is also the smaller part.