Down with the Mancharge

Budget Cutting Method #72 – Textbook Shopping

Now as a student, the Man doesn’t play a huge role in your education. You know that you go to college so that you may gain skills so at some point you can go work for the Man, but for the most part, he leaves you alone while you wax academic in your classrooms of choice. As long as you mind your business, enjoy your time in college, and don’t get all fussied up to protest some cause on the President’s Lawn, the Man will leave you be. After all, the Man is busy making cell phone commercials.

But there is one place on campus that the Man reigns supreme: the college bookstore.

I can’t imagine that there is a single university that has strayed from the Man’s model of the ideal college bookstore. It is designed to be a sterile, unfriendly place. It suffers from an extreme lack of character, is often cold, and is wall-to-wall books. The stock of such an establishment differs greatly from the inventories of your local Borders or Barnes and Noble. How are these book’s pre-selected to avoid those retail outlets?

More boredom for your buck.

The Man likes to stack his books horizontally, as opposed to the traditional vertical book spine configuration. Some would say that is how he divides what you need to purchase for each course. I would say it is so that the knowledge contained within becomes flat more quickly, and would be equivalent to partially unscrewing the caps of soda bottles to release carbonation. Anything cool that could have been in those books is DOA when you get back to your room.

As for pricing, you can take the Manufacturer’s Suggest Retail Price (MSRP), add a 6% boredom tax, and a 19% The Man Surcharge (Mancharge), and that’s how they get their pricing. I guarantee that your textbooks are more overpriced than Google’s stock. And $587.32 later (EACH SEMESTER), who can we thank for such a monetary whacking? Yes. The Man.

Well, I’ve had it.

I am in grad school to finely tune my skills in the areas of finance and commerce. And even if I retain little from my coursework, I can say I’ve gotten something out of my travails in MBA-land. For I have beaten The Man by seeking ways around him.

(He’s a man of great girth.)

Let’s say you have a textbook that costs $190. (And I do.) Now going to an online vendor of popular appeal (amazon, Borders) may get that book down to $170. Going to a wholesaler online maybe even drop that to $155. But I don’t want to learn $155 worth of new venture initation, even if the book was WRITTEN BY MY PROFESSOR. I’m ok with putting a price on knowledge, and I guarantee it’s not $155.

www.half.com is just the place to stick it to the Man.

So what if I have to wait for my books to come in from Wyoming? So what if they’re called “International Edition”? So what if they are soft cover and too tall to fit on a standard shelf? So what if the vendor was “jazzybooks83”? I paid 62 dollar for a 190 dollar book. And I’ve stuck it to the Man.