Katie Lee
The Auburn University bookstore has been recognized for its financial growth over a five-year period.
The award was presented to us by the--it's a combination of the Independent College Stores Association and Large Stores Group. We have put together our operating surveys. We each provide different financial information and a group of accountants put it together and look over the results. And over a five-year period, Auburn University bookstore had unusual and strong numbers when it came to the number of units sold.
Just all different types of metrics and measuring the success of a textbook program. General sales, in particular, number of rental units, number of physical units sold, cost of book, average cost of book, average savings per student and the savings include savings from our 10% discount rental program or reservation program, buyback, the cost, how we source books, we are sourcing off the Internet. It takes a lot of time to do that but if we can get a book for 40 and turn around and sell it for 45 or 50, that's better than getting a book from a publisher or a wholesaler for 80 or 120 and selling it marked up from there.
So we work very hard, Rusty Welden, assistant director for course materials, he and his team spend countless hours just searching for lowest priced books so that they can pass along the discount to students. So all of those different factors work into the award and who receives it. Auburn University was one of the two stores in the group of stores that were being reviewed and there are several hundred of them who showed positive trends in both sales volume and unit volume over that five year period which is remarkable.
Students choose to shop where they can afford to shop and sometimes that means the Internet. We get that. We have a price comparison tool on our website. We put that out there so students can see our price, our new, our used, our new rental/used rental price compared with just marketplace sellers like Amazon or Half.com, Barnes and Noble all sorts of other sites that are out there. So students can see for themselves what we're charging, what the other sellers are charging, and decide for themselves if they want to purchase from the bookstore.
We know we're not always going to be the lowest price, we try to be very competitive but we also offer a generous return policy and we have the right book. And if we've made a mistake, we will make it right. We will do whatever it takes to take care of the customer and the student. We also try and have the books on time so that they have them before the first day of class.
So the student can succeed in their class and do well. And ordering from the Internet, yeah you might save five bucks but or sometimes 15 but it might be 15-20 days before the book gets to you and then the student may not do as well [in the class] so um we do everything that we can and I'm proud of my team. I'm proud of being a part of Auburn University and I'm proud of our students. We've got a great student body here.
Absolutely. Student success is in our mission. Our mission is based on the university's mission and we're here to support the educational needs of Auburn students. If you succeed, we succeed. And so we know that um as an auxiliary we do pay our own way. We don't use state funds. We have to be self supporting. So we do also have to return money back to Auburn University. Everything above our cost goes right back to Auburn University. Still we want to have the books as affordable. Yes the university needs money but the students need to be able to afford these books.
And they are expensive. Students need the books and they need them when they need them. So that is our goal. It's worked out by design, by strategy that the textbook program is more of a very low margin low profit operation. Used books have more margin than new books. Publishers pretty much determine the pricing, we apply a margin to recover our costs on top of that with a little bit extra in case a class is cancelled and we have to return several hundred booksback and all the freight and everything involved with that. But textbooks, that's not where we're trying to make our money. We want to help Auburn students succeed. 5:40
The bookstore was assessed based off of different categories like general sales, average cost of book, average savings per student and the number of rental units sold, according to Lee.
"If we can get a book fro $40 and turn around and sell it for $45 or $50," Lee said, "that's better than getting a book from a publisher or a wholesaler for $80 or $120 and selling it marked up from there."
Rusty Weldon
About the same period of time, five years ago, we started looking at the way books were getting more expensive. And the different amounts of formats. And we decided to try to take a stand on campus and really look in the ways we can reduce prices across the board on anything that we could, whether that meant a discount inside the store
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