Cougs get choice of bookstores

PULLMAN – The new contract to let Barnes & Noble manage Washington State University’s student bookstore, the Bookie, has brought the nonprofit WSU Student Book Corp. the payoff it bargained for and some competition it didn’t.

The recent agreement with Barnes & Noble College Booksellers took effect on July 1. It has left many on campus and in Pullman wondering why, after 90 years of operating independently, the private nonprofit student bookstore would enter into a 10-year management agreement with a major corporation.

Board members of the Student Book Corporation (SBC) hope to dispel concerns by showing that the contract they signed a little over a month ago is in the best interest of the students. It guarantees the SBC a return of at least $1 million a year, a $500,000 one-time donation from Barnes & Noble and a promise to keep an 8 percent point-of-sale discount on all new and used textbooks.

“The students have a great deal here,” said Barry Johnston, a WSU staff member on the SBC board and WSU’s director of business services.

What may be another benefit to the students is that for the first time, the Bookie has a competitor. A group of former Bookie employees is opening the Crimson & Gray, an alternative textbook and supply store in Pullman.

While the Barnes & Noble deal may have happened quickly for campus, it wasn’t an easy or fast decision for the SBC board, Johnston said.

For more than a year, the student-majority volunteer board has been mulling the idea of bringing an outside business in to manage the store. The idea started more than five years ago, after the Bookie came off of two years of losses. WSU President V. Lane Rawlins experienced the Barnes & Noble management at his previous school, the University of Memphis. He encouraged the SBC board to take a look.

Though the Bookie’s managers have turned sales around in the past five years – last year the store had more than $17 million in sales and $800,000 in profits – the SBC board wondered if someone else could do better, said Johnson.

The board received three management proposals and decided the offer from Barnes & Nobles’ college division, a company that runs more than 500 college bookstores across the country, was the most interesting, he said.

And the contract with the SBC may be one of the best in the country, he said. After the first three months of Barnes & Noble management, either side can end the agreement with 180 days’ notice. The company agreed to offer the same product mix and services that the independent Bookie carried, and it paid the SBC Board $2 million for the stock on hand.

Barnes & Noble also offered the same jobs at the same pay to all of the employees at the Bookie. Only five chose not to take it, said Johnson.

Marketing professor and SBC board member Don Stem said he was one of the most skeptical of the deal at the start. “I thought the proposal was too good to believe,” he said. “I had reservations.”

Stem abstained from the board vote to accept the Barnes & Noble proposal because he felt the decision should be the students’. But after visiting several Barnes & Noble College Bookstores in Texas and talking to colleagues at other schools about it, he was won over to the idea. Other members of the board traveled to Harvard University, Yale and the Pennsylvania State University to visit those schools’ Barnes & Noble bookstores in person.

But most the students who voted to approve the contract had only been on the board a few weeks and hadn’t gone through the process of exploring the agreement that the previous board had. Still, they asked hard questions before signing the contract and knew it was something the previous group of students investigated and fully supported, said Hunt.

The board has not decided what to do with the $500,000 donation and the $1 million or more Barnes & Noble has promised to return each year, Hunt said. One possibility is increasing the student discounts on textbooks, he said. Neither he nor Johnston would say what else had been discussed.

For Barnes & Noble, the Bookie is a plum. The bookstores in Pullman, Vancouver, Spokane and Richland make it the biggest Barnes & Noble college bookstore in the state. WSU is now the only Pac-10 school to have a Barnes & Noble-managed store. The company also has bookstores at Seattle Pacific University and community colleges in Seattle. Barnes & Noble officials did not return telephone messages Thursday.

Not everyone is convinced the deal was in the best interest of the students. Three former Bookie managers have left the store to open the Crimson & Gray.

“I believe the decision the board made is really no longer focused on the students,” said Chuck Morrow, manager of the new store and former textbook manager at the Bookie. He said he worked at the Bookie for 10 years and was involved in the budget process. He doesn’t see how Barnes & Noble can make a profit without raising students’ costs. He also thinks the SBC is confusing profits with student benefit.

When he was manager, Morrow said, the goal was to offer the most books at the lowest prices. One way to do that was by keeping a large stock of used textbooks.

Barnes & Noble has promised to stock used textbooks at a 40-to-60 ratio to new books, which is similar to the old system.

When Morrow and co-workers Keith McIvor and John O’Bryan began to suspect the SBC Board was ready to sign a contract with Barnes & Noble this spring, they started talking with Nebraska Book Co. about creating an alternative bookstore in town. “I believe we can offer the students a better deal,” said Morrow.

Their plan to set up their store offering books, supplies and WSU clothing a few blocks from campus on NE Stadium Way was derailed a few weeks ago when Barnes & Noble exercised an option it had taken out several months earlier to rent the same property. But for the past few weeks, the three men have been moving on their second location choice, a corner store in the Wheatland Mall on the south side of Pullman.Though the new Crimson & Gray store is a few blocks farther from campus, it has plenty to offer students in the way of parking and in its proximity to ShopKo and Safeway, Morrow said. The managers are also planning to offer a shuttle from student neighborhoods.

They’re now working directly with professors to get their textbook lists. On Thursday, they received shipment of 15,000 used text books.

Even if the new store struggles its first year, it will be worthwhile, said Morrow. “If we can force Barnes & Noble to still give students good prices on their textbooks, we’re still successful.”