In a previous column I listed ways in which the Brown Bookstore beats Barnes and Noble on textbook prices and in service to the syllabus. The present column addresses the Campus Shop and the trade books department. Here are nine more reasons not to outsource the bookstore.
1. Brown-branded merchandise will be more expensive in a Barnes and Noble store than it is in our Campus Shop. Barnes & Noble pads its profit margin by price markups on sweatpants, coffee mugs and other branded merchandise. A 2004 study by Campus Bookstore Consulting, the leading company in the field, found that our Campus Shop beats the national chains on price across the board. CBC also found a wider selection in our Campus Shop. Our merchandise buyers order from everyone, while Barnes and Noble buyers are more or less restricted to authorized vendors. I'll come back to that CBC study in a moment. It's one of two 900-pound gorillas that Barnes and Noble advocates don't want you to know about.
2. Our Campus Shop beats the chains because its three buyers have among them 57 years in the job. They're high-profile people in the industry. They work with manufacturers to design Brown-specific items. They respond instantly to Brown events and occasions. They have long experience of shopping trends at Brown and on Thayer Street.
3. Where does the Barnes and Noble markup go? It goes to the Barnes and Noble empire and its owner, Leonard Riggio, so that he can gobble up more independent stores. Studies have shown that chain bookstores return less money to local economies. The advent of a Barnes and Noble on Thayer Street would hurt the character of the street and drive up rents, which is why there are so many small business owners on the roster of the Save the Bookstore Coalition. Also on that roster are our state senator, state representative, city councilman, leaders of trade organizations and hundreds of Brown faculty, students, alums and parents.
4. The roster also includes other bookstore proprietors because they know the industry story of Barnes and Noble inadequacy. Independent stores often step up to serve the depleted syllabus at Barnes and Noble campuses. Looking at New England alone, Labyrinth Books in New Haven attracts orders from Yale faculty who are dissatisfied with Barnes and Noble. In Cambridge, the Harvard Bookstore fills the same shortfall. At Mount Holyoke, Odyssey Books has won the syllabus from Follett, a Barnes and Noble rival. Famously, the Holy Cross bookstore re-acquired its independence after eight years of unsatisfactory service from Follett. Examples of New England schools that have kept non-chain bookstores are Dartmouth (Wheelock Books), Amherst (Jeffrey Amherst Store), Middlebury, Bowdoin, Bates, Colby, Boston College and the universities of Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont.
5. What about our bookstore's trade books department, the street-level store? Couldn't it do better on selection, and couldn't it look nicer? Yes it could - and cue the gorillas. In 2004, the bookstore paid for two hefty studies. The first was by the aforementioned Campus Bookstore Consulting. For a number of weeks CBC patrolled the aisles with clipboards, interviewed hundreds of customers and compared our product to that of other college stores. CBC found the bookstore needed a software upgrade and decor makeover, but that it was otherwise a superior store, for a world of reasons, and that it should remain owned and operated by Brown.
6. Also in 2004, the bookstore produced an internal report, titled "The Brown Bookstore Business Plan," which set out a schedule for implementing the CBC findings. It included floor plans (some with a cafe and visitor center) and a color catalogue of the client-work of Bergmeyer Associates, a high-end interior design firm. The bookstore also consulted other designers, among them Lerner, Ladds + Bartels of Providence, which has already done award-winning work for Brown. The bookstore wants its makeover to dazzle, and the classy product of either Bergmeyer or LLB is superior to Barnes and Noble interiors.
7. As for the reduced selection of books and magazines in the street-level store, it's easily fixed not by outsourcing, but by restoring our bookstore's mid-1990s inventory budget. If you can't find the scholarly book or magazine you want, it's because our inventory float was cut back in the past decade, which has tied our buyers' hands. There are four buyers in the trade books department and between them they have 63 years in the job. Our senior buyer has been the subject of articles in industry publications. In 2002, the Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed him and commented "The Brown Bookstore has long been one of the East Coast's best."
8. Does the bookstore have the money to beef up inventory and renovate? Indeed it does. University officials estimate that a makeover will cost something less than $1.5 million, a sum that the bookstore can reimburse fairly quickly. The bookstore has been quite profitable of late, especially since the closing of the College Hill Bookstore. We're ranked third nationally among large campus stores in sales per student. Most important, the bookstore is profitable even after it has paid rent, real estate taxes, interest on inventory, maintenance costs and University fees. It's profitable even after employee benefits have been disbursed and employees' children have received college grants of $10,000 per annum per family.
9. This brings us to the best argument of all for keeping the bookstore in Brown beneficence. There are 41 full-time employees, many of whom have carried their Brown IDs for decades. Their lives and the lives of their children are materially and intangibly improved by membership in Brown. They love serving this University, and it is no exaggeration or embarrassment to say that some hearts will break if they're expelled.
Peter Sprake '07 is a Brown Bookstore employee and invites you to check out www.savethebookstore.org, add your name to its roster of supporters and participate in the several events it will hold in April.
