Ideas, information and industry news for collegiate retailers

What makes training for your store and its employees so crucial? Find out in this guide!

The University of Central Missouri built a brand new bookstore in the middle of campus that opened up this past August. In the video below, UCM Store Director Charlie Rutt walks us through the new building and talks about how the changes have boosted his business. Check it out!

If you haven’t heard of it before, Periscope is a new app that uses live streaming video to reach followers anytime, anyplace. All a Periscope user has to do is pull out his or her phone, open the app, and start filming. Their followers will get a notification on their phone saying that User X has just gone live, thereby encouraging them to tune in and see what’s happening.

Every October, National Student Day is celebrated at college stores around the country. For the third year in a row, the Rocker Shop on the campus of the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology got in the holiday spirit and put together their own event to show their appreciation for their students. This year, they celebrated their students in a couple of ways.

Technology and the internet are a part of everyday life for collegiate retail stores. Today, concerns for those stores include focusing on things like increasing sales through the store website or securely organizing their data or inventory in a digital format.

In 2008, the University of Wisconsin Alumni Association was looking for a fun and incentivized way get Badger graduates involved in scholarship fundraising. What they came up with was fairly simple, but the response they got was outstanding. The idea they settled on was a t-shirt that would be uniquely designed before each school year, and then retired as the next year’s shirt went on sale. They decided to call their creation the "Red Shirt,” in honor of the school’s primary color that is prominently featured on each iteration.

Instead of sending out the same emails to faculty that they use every year, Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., has chosen to go a different route. Last summer, they decided to create and distribute about 350 “Focus on Faculty” folders in an effort to educate their professors on the role they play in the success of the bookstore. And after last year’s folders went over well, Book Manager Hannah Wallace decided to distribute them again this fall.

You and your staff know all the ways you try to provide cost-savings in the bookstore. But do your students or the campus? Probably not. Maybe they have some vague idea, but rare is the student that is fully aware of all the ways you help them save and has not bought into the myth that college bookstores are wildly overpriced. So with that in mind, we want you to get out there and educate them; show them what they don’t know!

Creating fans for life is something every store would love to do. It provides an enthusiasm and continued support that lasts longer than four to six years, and it can help bolster enrollment numbers in the future.

Enter the #iShopGreen contest! Show us your green purchase by tagging @calpolystores and using the #iShopGreen hashtag! You could win $50 to the University Store!