Oh, Mr. Bookstore, please don’t make us eat packets of ketchup this month just because we need to buy books!
This is how many students think about the University Bookstore. They dread it, they hate it-after all, how can you like a place where you have to spend hundreds of dollars every semester?
What we should realize, however, is that the bookstore isn’t just out to get student money-the bookstore is helping us and saving us money.
Why has the bookstore become such a sore spot with students? The resounding answer is the outrageously expensive books. I’ve heard sob story after sob story from students telling me they’ve spent $200 to $500 in textbooks- stories which I believe to be true.
Isn’t it also true, though, that these students spent $200 to $500 on books for classes they themselves choose to take?
Yes, textbooks are pricey. But students act as though the U Bookstore is the only place where textbooks are expensive.
Here’s a little slice of reality: Textbooks are expensive everywhere and no amount of griping will change that.
A few months ago, The Chronicle published an article about the bookstore suggesting that an extra fee would be added to students’ total if they paid with a credit card.
Shane Hinckley, assistant director of the bookstore, said that report was absolutely false. While credit-card companies are increasing the price for credit charges, the bookstore is not passing this extra fee on to students.
Hinckley said the bookstore is continually coming up with other options to help students. For example, the bookstore will automatically take 5 percent off the total purchase when students use their UCards. And that’s not to mention the already “academically discounted” technology center, meaning manufacturers selling merchandise to the bookstore at lower prices so they can charge us less.
“Additionally,” Hinckley said, “part-time positions at the bookstore are only available to students.”
Yet, with all these efforts to save us money, students still think ill of the bookstore.
My friends, it’s time to stop blaming the bookstore for our empty wallets at the beginning of every semester. Did you know that only half of the bookstore’s entire dollar volume comes from textbooks?
“The other half,” Hinckley says, “comes from everything else.”
In other words, don’t complain that you have no money because your textbook was expensive; evidently your money is also going toward sweatshirts, Mr. Grips, Nalgene bottles and other indulgences.
Furthermore, almost all of the profits from all these sweatshirts and textbooks go into a bond system responsible for campus upkeep. Ultimately, the Big Bad Bookstore is providing things such as air conditioning, trash removal, floor cleaning, etc., with its profits.
The U Bookstore is not the hungry Cyclops we think it to be. It has come up with many ways to help students save money, or earn money as the case may be, because it realizes that books are expensive and that students have limited means.
Plus, if the bookstore makes a lot of money from you, that’s not such a bad thing because it comes right back to you in air conditioning.