For nearly two centuries, Phillips Academy students have flocked en masse to the Andover Bookstore at the beginning of each year. According to Director of Risk Management & Administrative Services Maureen Nunez, who is responsible for communicating with the Andover Bookstore, the school has had a contract with the bookstore since 1996. Manager of the Andover Bookstore John Hugo said that PA students provide two-thirds of their profit during the month of September, and 25 percent of their overall annual income. For the three days at the beginning of the year, when the influx of Andover students is especially high, the Bookstore is essentially closed to other customers, Hugo said. “We don’t do any business with other customers [during these three days]. They usually just look and go away.” Most students trek down to the Bookstore the day returning students arrive. On that day, the lines fill the first floor of the store and sometimes even snake several feet up the stairs or out the door. Khalil Flemming ’12 said, “It’s easy to find the books that you need. The only part that isn’t organized is the line. The students need to figure out how to do it on their own … People are leaving with the books but the line isn’t moving.” “A lot of people don’t know where the end of the line is, so they just scoot into the middle,” he continued. According to Hugo, approximately 85 percent of the books were available for sale two weeks before classes started. Nunez said, “We encourage students to get their books as soon as their schedules become available and as soon as they arrive on campus … We are working with the Bookstore to increase automation and we hope that the campus one-card implementation will improve the situation next fall.” Flemming said, “It would have been easier to order [the books] online.” Ordering books online may be a more cost-effective option, but most students cannot, as the booklist is not available on PAnet early enough to do so. The prices for small paperback books are approximately equivalent through Amazon.com. The bigger differences occur for large textbooks. For example, a precalculus texbook costs $161 at the Bookstore, but only $115 on Amazon.com. A Chemistry textbook costs $148 at the Bookstore and $92 on Amazon.com. In an interview with The Phillipian last year, Robert Hugo, Hugo’s father, said, “In the scheme of things, we are very competitive with other retailers … Part of the problem is that we also do not sell a third of our books while some classes also get cancelled.”
