The Campus Bookstore

Welcome to the campus bookstore. After spending an obscene amount of money on official NCAA clothing and eight textbooks, why not fill out a job application to help pay it off? While your cashier and future co-worker scurries off to find the hiring manager, feel free to leaf through Mother Jones or the other left-wing trash the bookstore peddles to students in its magazine section.

Nike Pro-Shop

You might be tempted to ask the employee behind the counter if you took a wrong turn and ended up in Sports Authority, but worry not - this is the bookstore. It's just that Nike or Reebok have a corporate deal with the school and the bookstore makes some serious Gs each month off of suckers like you.

Who wants a $75 throwback jersey from two decades ago when our team didn't suck? Oh look, a $27 pink baseball hat with the school logo for the girls, and a camo version for their boyfriends. Or maybe your dear old mother would like to advertise to everyone in the mall parking lot that she is indeed the "#1 Longhorn Mom" with a $34 license plate frame.

One-Stop Pharmacy

Some campus bookstores may feature a small pharmacy with such college dorm-room essentials like toothbrushes and deodorant. This is also the place where you can blow through your flex bucks on Plan B in a sweaty panic one night, because the bookstore sells birth control, hooray! If only your parents knew why they were putting more money in your student account, young lady. You will quickly realize, however, that you are truly paying a premium for convenience when everything costs 200 percent more than it would at Walgreens.

Textbooks

After picking up your game gear and school-colored condoms, you head over to the department where the bookstore actually gets its namesake.

Lo and behold, every other freshman is also enrolled in Biology 101, and to your horror there are no copies of the required text left on the shelf. You will go to the counter and badger the overworked student staff about the lack of books. You will be put on back order, which means you get to beg classmates to make photocopies of their books for the first two weeks of school. Finally, an employee goes in the back and digs up a hidden Biology book for you, possibly out of an attempt to shut you up, or maybe because you're a hot girl.

You will then discover that this book costs an outrageous $142 used and some jerk marked up half of it with six different highlighters. Then when the semester is over and you return to sell it back, they will tell you that they can only give you $30 because the book is in "poor condition". Or better yet, you will discover that the professor decided to change editions next year, which means they won't buy it back at all because 300 words might be different or something. During your fit of violent rage on an undeserving employee target, you might be unwisely asked if you would like to donate the book. The only appropriate response in such a situation is, "No you bastard, I would not, I want half its original value".


Well, consider this semester a costly learning experience. From now on, you will simply buy and sell all of your books on Half.com and get your team T-shirts from the local Walmart.