Who’s Running the Bookstore?

Insider Report from Rowan
One of my best friends worked as a contractor at Rowan before the B&N take over and does not have fond memories of the place. The former management would not allow the store to be reorganized to help prevent students from purchasing unneeded materials, did not always stock the books in the needed sections (and then students were told the book was out of stock). They overworked contract staff and treated student workers like “trained chimps.” Tracking orders and then pulling those order was a hit and miss process due to a lack of communication between the staff which was driven by low morale and a few in upper management who insisted on controlling everything themselves and not communicating store processes. There were also other instances of personal mismanagement. For example:

“Books would randomly go missing, because [head of the store] felt one book having a massive amount of space was important if it was a large class, or the teacher was too particularly bitchy, so excess materials would get put in the backroom, and no one would be taking account of them, so they got ‘lost.’ Usually to be found once a year during inventory…Administrators and clerks would order books late to spite a nasty professor.”

The professors were not blameless in the process either. While most of the instructors got in lists of needed materials on time:

“Some of them didn’t turn any in at all, and they would threaten to flunk the kids for not having the books…[The students would] come to us, angry, and instead of calling the professors? Not our problem. Go back and tell your prof she never ordered the book!…Often profs would call the library and ask them to pull excess copies of the textbooks, so the students would be forced to buy them. They’d then blame the bookstore, saying we yanked them to make copies and sell for the same price of the book…”

My friend also noted:

“The problem with not enough books getting ordered? That’s not an accident. They do that on purpose. If we had 300 kids enrolled in a class, I’d be told [to order] about 55% of the class size, usually. Because many will drop, change, or be stupid enough to buy the wrong book out of desperation and be too late to get their refund.’ Also, internet sales like Amazon and collegebooks.com were a big argument for ordering less– most of the students won’t buy their books here, they said. They’re all white rich south Jersey yuppies, the few that are on financial aid to pay for their books will do it early or deal.”

This irritated my friend who was both on the front lines of dealing with these students and understood many of the students were not wealthy and on financial aid, but appeals fell on deaf ears.

B&N though compounded this work situation. Everyone in the store was either fired or transferred to another area at various points of the transition, more often then not leaving a skeleton crew during peak seasons. Transfers were limited, could not be arranged more then 30 days in advance, and could have cost the employees $6K of pay per year depending on what was open to transfer to. B&N also, “discouraged us from going into the system and fixing errors [during the transition].” and then proceeded to try to run a screwed up store with no one that understood any part of the madness – and then tried to do this on the cheap.

I’m almost thinking an MBA class would have a field day examining the place.