Staff Opinion
Prices
The prices were decent. They weren’t as good as Amazon and Chegg, but they weren’t as high as they used to be. – Rachel Crawford
Although the new bookstore offers cheaper prices on textbooks for students, the shipping cost is outrageous. You have to pay shipping for each individual book, which in some cases can cost twice as much as the actual textbook you are trying to buy. – Hannah Flood
I heard a lot of great news about the revamped bookstore, but as soon as I compared the prices to my findings at Amazon and Barnes and Noble, I quickly realized the bookstore was still not giving me the lowest prices. – Abby Ojeda
It’s a given that purchasing a semester’s worth of textbooks will be expensive but with the new bookstore, I’ve spent more than I’ve ever had to in the last four years. It’s unfortunate that each textbook came from a separate warehouse forcing students to pay shipping costs for each individual book. – Emma Gomes
Like most people I’ve talked to, the most expensive part of buying from the new bookstore was the cost of shipping. Since you’re paying for shipping for every individual book (usually between $5 and $8), buying more than a few books quickly gets expensive. – Sidney Shank
Ease of Use
The purpose of Meredith’s bookstore has never been to provide the books at their lowest available cost. The books they stocked on their shelves were good options for students who needed a book immediately, wanted to rent one from Meredith, or simply wanted to see what the correct book actually looked like. Now that Meredith no longer stocks hard copies of books, most of its function is moot. The new bookstore has prices lower than they used to and is more “with the times,” but now competes directly with suppliers like Amazon and Chegg who frequently offer books at cheaper prices–the Meredith bookstore no longer has a feature that sets it apart. – Mimi Mays
Because textbooks are sourced from all over the country, from bookstores of various sizes, shipping time is very sporadic and would pose a serious problem if you needed your textbooks quickly. I much preferred the old bookstore, even though it was slightly more expensive, it was a more reliable way of purchasing your books. – Hannah Flood
I believe that the new bookstore was a good idea in theory, but as people have mentioned, it has its share of problems; I tried to sell a book on the Marketplace last semester to have a little more money for this semester’s textbooks, and the process was a complicated one. You get to sell your books for whatever cost you want, as long as you think someone would buy it at that price, but you are responsible for shipping the item yourself. The hassle just wasn’t worth it for me since I could easily sell it to other Meredith students via Facebook. – Tishya Robertson
Part of the joy in an actual bookstore is the ability to reliably obtain your books, to not have to worry about shipping or quality issues. The online bookstore removes that security, and essentially makes textbook shopping much less convenient. I don’t mind having an online bookstore, but think they should have either kept the physical bookstore or phase it out more slowly than they did. – Cro Owens
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