Monopolistic practices drive up campus Bookstore prices

    In my hand I held the one document that might break my bankbook, or rather my parents’. It wasn’t my credit card bill. It wasn’t a DUI or public drunkenness citation. I wasn’t even buying gas. It was my PawPrints Bookstore receipt. All $458 worth, but is it really worth that much?
    “I paid a lot,” said Matt Scott, a senior accounting major. “And I think I should pay less.”
    Scott paid about $420 for his books this semester.
    The problem, however, does not just affect GCSU, but affects university students and staff all across the country.
    “This is something that has been recognized on a state level by the Board of Regents, it’s on the national level because there are articles in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today that bring up the fact that text book prices, over the past five years, have out paced inflation by a  2-to-1 ratio,” said Mike Haun, marketing manager of Auxiliary Services.
    But what causes the problem? And what can be done to relieve the pressure of buying text books?
    Kyle Cullars, executive director of Auxiliary Services, says that book prices are driven up due to the monopolistic qualities of book publishers.
    “Larger publishers are buying up smaller publishers. You have fewer and fewer people compet-ing and in the process it has driven prices through the roof,” he said.
    And simple economics tell us that when competition goes down, prices go up.
    Haun concurred.
    “You won’t find a better price,” he said.
    Some students turn to alternative methods, like the Internet, to gather their books. But Haun said that when you buy a book in that fashion you don’t exactly know the condition of the book, you don’t know if it is the exact book you need and that by the time you add in shipping time and cost it would have been better to purchase the book from the book store.
    “You are gambling when you buy online,” he said.
    And this is true for Victoria Dalesio, a senior rhetoric and philosophy major.
She said that she took the time to shop around and compare the PawPrints Bookstore’s prices with online vendors and determined that PawPrints would be her best bet.
    “It wasn’t grossly unfair,” Dalesio said.
    She still ended up paying right at $400 for her books.
    And this money is not going into anyone’s pocket. Cullars said that the bookstore marks up the price of new books by 25%. The majority of that covers expenses, such as payroll, only about 4.4% of that is actual profit.
      “All that money is put back into student facilities and services,” Cullars said.
      So what is Auxiliary Services doing to help alleviate the problem?
      “The number one way we can reduce textbook prices is by students participating in the buy back program,” Haun said.
    He said that every used book attained lowers the number of new books that have to be bought, which then in turn keeps the books’ prices lower.
    Cullars and Haun also gave steps that professors could take to help lighten the costs, like adhering to the bookstores book adoption and not requiring new books.
    So next semester when you bite the bullet and buy your books, just remember that somebody out there is trying to help you.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 1 2006. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry