Imagine owning a monopoly on books. You could run a shady little business feeding off of innocent ignorant high school kids for some serious profits. All you would have to do is offer convenience: a brief walk from school, the option to file his or her parents’ credit card numbers, an organized set up of almost every class’ required books, and a simple return policy. With all this, you could jack up the prices and call it The Andover Bookstore. But what happens when an external competition, such as Amazon.com, is introduced into the picture? Lowering prices to beat Amazon’s “deep discount” would be an honest and fair adjustment. So that’s what you do. You pick two mass produced textbooks with universal values already similar to those of Amazon’s, and decrease the price just enough to win. That way, you can advertise your new Amazon induced prices, manipulating students into buying the rest of his or her books there as well. Once again, we witness the power of convenience. Now how do you avoid revealing exactly how expensive these other hundreds of books are? For starters, you can forget about marking the prices on the back of each book. You can also use the oldest and slowest registers you can find. That way, the kids will get to the register and it’ll be too late; no going back now, especially after they just spent their only free afternoon standing in that long, windy line that seemed to only grow longer the more you waited and the more everyone in front of you let their friends cut in front. If you’re smart like Jen Downing ’08 and I, one person has line duty and the other has make-a-presence-in-line-then-go-get-both-sets-of-books-then-come-back-to-your-place-in-line duty. We both still end up waiting for a long time, but it shaves off a solid hour. The line does have its pluses: it’s a great time to get small talk with acquaintances over with. You know, the usual: “How was your break?”, “What sport are you doing?”, “Ah, I know, Upper year is going to suck!” Anyway, once they reach the register they’re so fatigued they just want to sit down and don’t even care about how much it adds up to. Good thing you lowered the prices of those two textbooks because it all adds up in the end. But not to worry; the students won’t see a dime leave their pocket as they give you their last name to access their parents’ credit card numbers. Now you can go to sleep at night knowing you’re not exploiting poor innocent children–just their parents. Now that the students have wiped out the books, what can we do to keep it that way? Well, you can implement a strategic return policy: allow the students X number of days of changing classes to return or exchange books, but set a stringent deadline that is inconvenient for the students, such as Thursday, when they’ll have too much work to come down and will think that the bookstore will still accept everything a day late. Of course, they will be wrong because we’ll ship out all the unsold books back to the publishers on Thursday and the students will be stuck with the books. Even if you throw a fit, begging them to make an exception for this one measly hundred something dollar history book, they tell you: “If I make an exception for you, I’ll have to do it for everybody.” If you ask to personally return it to the publishers, they tell you that won’t do. To compensate for this cruel and manipulative system, they offer free animal crackers and coffee to customers. After spending hundreds of dollars at the store, customers will feel like they’re getting a bit of their money’s worth if they take a cup of animal crackers to go. But we don’t want to take advantage of them (that’s a one way street people), so we always make sure not to take so many for there to be enough crackers for everyone—just to be fair.
