OUR VIEW: Get ready for your date with the Bookstore
The time has come for students to begin shelling out hundreds of dollars for five-pound books we now have to lug around. Shopping for books is not only depressing, but can even sometimes be a pain. And now that pain just got bigger.
The USU Bookstore, in its efforts to help students, has helped us ring in the new year with frustration and anger. The bookstore has decided it does not want students to come in and out in a timely manner, but wants us all stuck there searching for our textbooks until our limbs give out.
Organizing, or rather de-organizing, the textbooks from being listed by class to the current setup – by author’s last name – is just wrong. For one, it forces students to print out booklists ahead of time, and it also takes twice as long to find the books on the list.
Before, all we had to know was what classes we were taking and all the books for that class would be grouped together. Now rather then searching for five sections of the bookstore, we get to search for 15.
We pity the English majors who have seven novels for one class. We pity the engineering majors, whose books comprise half the weight of the store. We pity anyone who has to spend an extra hour a semester walking around the bookstore carrying overpriced textbooks.
We have heard the new system is in response to space issues, and we suppose that the bookstore made this change in order to save money, but it seems to be doing just the opposite. Now the bookstore has to supply a handy little kiosk for students so they can print out their lists if they don’t do it ahead of time, a waste of paper and money. While they may not have to hire additional staff, bookstore employees will certainly have their hands full helping students locate their purchases.
We all would like to ask the bookstore “Why?”. It certainly isn’t in the best interest of the students. It doesn’t seem to save them any money. Why change a perfectly good system? Is it because this is the way BYU organizes their books? Because that certainly is no indicator of a good system that we should all follow.
It could be because the bookstore wants to spice things up in the students’ lives. It could be because they want us to not only read the books, but now have memorized the author’s last name. But personally, we think it’s because the bookstore has become just too needy.
We don’t expect the bookstore to go back to the old ways, so to the bookstore: be prepared for a lot of confused customers. To the students: get your book list and make sure you have extra time when you visit the store. In fact, the extra fee to have Book-it arrange your materials for you doesn’t sound so bad anymore.