The question of the day. Would you rather have the bookstore run by the university or a capitalist-pig infiltrated private firm?

Let’s look at the issues. The bookstore made $250,000 last year that went back into a bond revenue fund. This means the more profits the bookstore makes, the fewer fee increases the students have to pay. The problem is that while sales are going up every year, the profit keeps going down. This seems to indicate the possibility of inefficiencies somewhere. Hard to believe.

If a private firm comes in, how much will it contribute to our bond revenue fund? The best deal of the possibilities seems a flat rate plus a percentage of sales. And since the bookstore is run so poorly now, there’s no way a private firm could do much worse. I’m sure that if we can cut a fair deal with the outside firm, we will be getting more than $250,000 a year.

So how about service? I believe how much the bookstore makes a year is secondary to the service it provides. Will a private firm provide the same level of service that the present bookstore does? This is a tough question because the private firm has to be concerned with profits while the university-run store doesn’t have to worry about anything.

That’s another problem. There’s no way in hell civil service workers at the bookstore can lose their jobs. It seems that efforts in the past to fire workers who were blatantly unproductive didn’t go through. A major problem with the bookstore now is that it’s strapped with a civil service system that doesn’t care how useless a worker is. (This might be one of the reasons that a former director left and opened the Village Commons Bookstore.)

The service will probably be better with a private firm. A private firm will have sales and promotions and stuff. It can add products we might want in the bookstore. (University-run bookstores can’t add products not closely related to what legislators think a bookstore should sell.) If it doesn’t have your business, no raises or promotions. It will have to serve you, or VCB will.

What about books? It can make for a rough semester running to the library to read every chapter in a book that wasn’t available for you to buy. The bookstore now gets emergency textbooks in a week to 10 days. One of the outside firms vying for the bookstore has 200 other college bookstores that they can get textbooks from. They claim they get 90 percent of the emergency orders in three days. I don’t know if this is true, but with all those other stores, I think it’s possible.

If the bookstore was university run, we would have more control. We could maybe start some internship programs working in the bookstore. The idea has come up in the past, but our administrators haven’t found the time to get it started. The same firm mentioned above already has a program where it gives two students a semester full scholarships and manager-in-training jobs. These students learn about managing a bookstore, not just stocking shelves. It would be nice to have this without the outside firm, but who’s gonna do it?

I called the last bookstore director, Stan Shedaker, to see what he thought about the deal. Shedaker left last spring because he had several ideas to improve the bookstore but was continually stifled by the bureaucracy at NIU. He is definitely in favor of our keeping the bookstore. He has been to many privately run college bookstores and says that most are run well, but a bookstore run by the school still could provide better services.

But what about NIU? Shedaker said if the administration at NIU is going to continue the level of support they have given to the bookstore in the past, then he believes the students will be better served with a private firm.

Yea, and then maybe we could find an outside firm to teach more effectively than some of the clowns that are here now.