Recently, a former colleague posted a gripe on Facebook illustrating a generation gap that partly explains why students aren’t buying textbooks: Of his 100-plus freshmen at a competitive southeast state school, only two knew the definition of a verb.
Salty, sweet or protein-rich: food is guaranteed to drive students into your store morning, noon and night.
The latest Chicago store has a laptop-shaped roof. Once finished, the retail haven will resemble a giant transparent box, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, architects have said. Whatever you think of the brand, it’s hard to deny that Apple is a leader in redefining the brick-and-mortar shopping experience.
It saves more than time. It saves the life of your store. With Advanced Retail Center, Arc, from MBS Systems, you have more time and energy for customers, for training associates and for ensuring your store is a campus destination.
The start of the school year is prime time to cultivate loyalty among new customers. Don’t wait until rush to reach out. Plan a treat for newcomers now that you can advertise during orientation and schedule early in the year.
Winning the heart of today’s student means showing you care about the two things: money and career.
When the iPad® first appeared in 2010, I was among those who believed print texts were going the way of vinyl. Print might fulfill the longings of future collectors and fetishists, I thought, but for those of us whose profession relied on books, the practical attractions of a digital library would trump any sentimental attachment to the gleam of a paperback spine.
Drawing students to your store for buyback is step one. Step two can be even trickier: Ensuring customers leave feeling happy with the cash they get for their books.
Given the careening cost of higher education, it might be tempting to cut required texts from your syllabus in order to help students save money. If you’ve been teaching a while, you likely have ample resources for giving lectures, assigning homework and conducting assessments. However, if you eliminate the opportunity for students to engage with a text, you eliminate more than an expense. You deprive students of the ability to develop one of our most fundamental skills — reading — in your class.
Administrators and academics differ on a host of topics, but, politics aside, you know there are a lot of non-faculty on campus you appreciate. Without the department office manager, you would be stuck laboring over a copy machine more hours than you’d like. Without a well-staffed counseling center, you would have nowhere to send students in need of emotional support. Without advisors, your students would be even more confused about their path to graduation, especially at a large university where the bureaucracy is complex. An official school bookstore textbook manager is an oft-overlooked member of the administration who deserves your appreciation.
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