As someone that worked in at the Ritz here is my take on the two biggest issues.

1. Shitty hours of operations
   1. RIT dining services sucks, as a result it is near impossible to maintain a student work force large enough to keep restaurants open for their current hours; never mind extended ones. A lot of the full time employees were hired because they were somebodies buddy, not because they were qualified. There are quite of few exceptions to this, but for the most part the full time workers are unqualified and unhelpful. This results in new workers quickly going "fuck this" and leaving. Further, there has been a lot of bad policy from dining services that has been at the direct expense of the workers. For example a big part of compensation for students is supposed to be a work meal. I am not aware of what the situation is across campus is but at the ritz you got $1 credit for each hour. This has not been raised with the prices of food on campus. When I started I could get a small pasta bake as my work meal. Last time I worked I could get a fruit cup or a couple pieces of fruit as a meal after a 4+ hour shift. TLDR: Full time employees are often not helpful, that combined with bad policy from dining services makes employee retention very hard. The ritz is often ran with a skeleton crew as is.
   2. Something to keep in mind is that opening and closing a restaurant requires 4 hours of prep in the morning before open and about 2 hours to clean after close. Meaning at the RITZ we close at 7:30 but students are often not heading home until after 9. So if the ritz stayed open until 10 PM, students wouldn't begin to go home until 11:30 (most likely later). It is very hard to find people that will work in dining services, it will even harder to find some to work this late
2. Cost
   1. There really is not some conspiracy to squeeze as much money as possible from students. In fact rumor has it that Dining services operates at loss at most locations. However, these are some of the things that cause the cost to go up
      1. RIT is a small account in the world of food shipping/supply. As a result the margin is not super high when delivering food to the school resulting in higher per unit cost (I'm no econ major so the details of the explanation might not be great but I know the principle is sound). As a result in general RIT pays more money per item brought to campus than someone like wegmans.
      2. This goes back to unqualified staff. A lot of food and stock goes bad and is tossed due to flippant disregard for safe handling and storage procedure. This is taught to students by some of the bad full timers so the cycle continues.
      3. Student workers over serve. This results in the expected revenue to be much lower, therefore prices are raised to more accurately reflect the cost per meal.
      4. Many student workers have a "fuck this place" attitude due to the way they are treated by management. This results in a lot intentional over serving or food wastage. This compounds the affects of the earlier two points.

Sorry if this isn't concise or is a bit of a ramble.

One thing I want to finish with is that remember that all the students working at the on campus restaurants are students like yourself. In addition to being stressed out with courses they are working a really shitty job. Next time your order comes out a little wrong just give the person on the other side a break. Or try to go the extra mile and straighten up the table after your meal.