The U Bookstore is officially that little rock in your shoe that won’t, no matter how hard you try to shift your toes, stop cutting your feet.
Let’s start with the lockers and cubbyholes. Cubbyholes? Honestly, when there’s a 10-minute break between classes, and a student just has to get a binder to throw some power point slides into so that she can properly take some notes, why is that student stopped and asked to properly stow her bag?
Who wants to shove his bag, which has a million personal items in it, including an iPod and a laptop, into a freaking cubbyhole? No one, that’s who!
Now, the bookstore will tell you that if you are worried about the safety of your personal belongings, you can just as easily shove them into a locker that will refund you the quarter that it requires to operate it when you are done using it.
What if a student doesn’t have a quarter? Well, he or she can walk over to customer service to wait for help, and then finally get a quarter on loan from the bookstore, which they will trust you to bring back when you’re finished with it.
Oh, but wait, in the time that it took to figure all of this out, there is only five minutes left to walk from the bookstore to HYPR West.
Can you say late for nutrition class?
Why? Why, when anybody can walk into a Barnes & Noble-which is larger in size and has more customers at any one time than the U Bookstore does -with a bag, purse or satchel of some sort, can we not, as adults, do the same here on campus?
Could it be that perhaps the bookstore thinks the students are less than honest and likely to thieve a U shot glass or two?
Well, while we are here casting stones about dishonesty, let’s flip the coin and talk about how the bookstore is blatantly overpriced (no shocker there) and how a vast majority of the International Standard Book Numbers for course books are different from what they are supposed to be.
So when a poor unknowing soul decides that he or she wants to pay $20 less for a book on Amazon, he or she can’t tell whether the right book is being purchased because the real ISBN, which is listed on Amazon, doesn’t match up with the course listings that the trusted bookstore gives.
Where is the trust, people?
The bookstore should have a little more faith in the students at the U (or maybe a little more security). It should also stop ripping us off, whether it knows it is or not, and maybe the students at the U will be able to have a little more faith in it.