Since it’s textbook-buying season again, I’m curious as to how college bookstores across the country handle buybacks and returns.
The store where I work allows people 12 days after the start of class to bring their books back for a full refund. They have to have the receipt. New books can have the plastic wrap removed, but if there are any markings in a book, it’s refunded at the used price.
After the 12th day of class, people have four days to return a book for a full refund. The plastic/marking policy is still in place. If someone has to drop out of school because of a death in the family, they can get a full refund on their books.
As for buybacks, we buy back books year-round. Except for a couple of weeks after each long semester and a brief period at the end of the summer, we buy back books at whatever price a wholesale company is willing to pay. This is always a fairly small fraction of the cover price.
During the other times, we buy back books we need for hour shelves at half the new price, whether the book is new or used. If a new book sells for $100, the used book sells for $75, and will be bought back at $50 provided we need it.
We also have a rebate program, where students can turn in their receipts for the fiscal year and get usually 10% of the total back as store credit.
I’ve been told that our policies are more liberal than other schools, and I’m curious to see if that’s actually true. For purposes of comparison, I’m interested in American colleges and universities, for current students or people who have graduated in the past few years.
At the local college I went to, if a book was shrinkwrapped or had software included that was sealed, you couldn’t return it at all if it had been opened. I didn’t know of any time limits for full refunds of “normal” or still-sealed books. There was no rebate program; the buyback rates were usually one-third to one-half of what you paid new for a book, and they they’s turn around and sell it used for 66%-80% of the price of a new book. …All this wouldn’t have been so bad had the books not been mostly crap–every couple years there’s a new “edition” with different graphics and (useless) pictures and different chapter problems or software, and the old editions became worthless. A few books came with “sign-on names” to log on to the publisher’s website to do class-related activities, and the sign-on names would expire in a year, so those books were worthless used also because the only way to get a working sign-on name was to buy another book.
…
It was a screw job pretty much any way you went, unless you were poor enough to get gov’t grants and then all your books are “free”. If you paid your own way you got fucked on books.
-Welfare state, anyone?
~
There is another forum/thread regarding text books, the publishers, instructors requiring new or different texts so last years don’t qualify for resale etc. Just another scam to rip off the student, and parents bank account. Don’t even mention the “free” text books for special students which are payed for you and me via the IRS!
When I was a student at the Univ. of Minnesota (decades ago), the bookstore there had a scam they ran.
They had one price to buy used textbooks that would be used in a class next quarter (about 35% of the original price). They had a much lower price for used textbooks that were not going to be used in a class next quarter (about 15-20% of the original price).
But many of the huge, beginning classes that nearly all students ended up taking were offered only every other quarter. So the bookstore would buy your books back at the much lower price, because the course would not be offered next quarter, and “we might not even be able to sell these books again, if that course isn’t offered any more”. But the course had been taught for a dozen or more years, by the same professor, using the same textbook. They just stored the books for a couple of months, then sold them for 4-5 times the price they had paid students for them.
So students started holding the books an extra quarter themselves, and then selling them back at the higher price, since now the class was being offered next quarter. (But most students were too broke to do this – they needed to sell their used books right now to buy next quarters books.) So the bookstore started demanding to see the original receipt, and would only pay the higher price if the book had been purchased in the previous quarter. Bastards!
Eventually they stopped doing this, supposedly in response to the complaints. Actually, I think the paperwork hassle of checking all the receipts was too much work for them. Plus a black market in bookstore receipts had sprung up. (Back then, the receipts only showed the price, no identification of the specific book or purchaser. Cheapo’s were using antiquated cash registers.)
I’ve despised the University Bookstores ever since then. Only place where I would NOT say anything if I saw someone shoplifting!
My bookstore: Classes start on Monday, and you have until the Friday of that week to return with receipt for refund. If you don’t get it back by then, you can sell it back (maybe, if they don’t change books for financial gain) after finals week for between 30 and 40% of original price. Damn irritating, because we have Friday classes that make it impossible to return the book if you want to drop the class, which you also can’t do for a refund after that first Friday.
My bookstore has the policy that you can’t return any books with highlighting or writing in them. Thankfully crayola has eraseable highlighters. VERY useful if you want to sell the books back.
Our bookstore buys back textbooks at 50% of the new price, and sells them at 75% of the new price.
Unfortunately, unlike clayton’s store, ours makes no distinction between books in perfect condition and books with heaps of marking and dog-eared pages. So you get stiffed for keeping your books in good condition, and you get stiffed if you get to the bookstore after the other people and have to pay 75% of the new price for a dog-eared, marked piece of shit when the other people paid the same price for a book in perfect condition.
The only excuse for such a blanket policy, as far as i can see, is laziness on the part of store management.
This is why I learned to love buying/selling text books on Amazon Marketplace. Last year of grad school, books washed out at cost of shipping, plus maybe a few dollars lost here and there.