Las Positas College is soon to lose several million printed words. On September 30, the physical bookstore on campus will close indefinitely. The virtual store, found in the “Students” section of the college website, will replace its tangible counterpart.
Five months ago, Follett – the company responsible for providing and running the school’s bookstore – emailed administrators on the subject of dismal returns.
“We, in the Spring,” LPC President Dyrell Foster said, “received a notice from Follett who indicated that because of a lack of revenue, they weren’t able to maintain a store on campus.”
Blame for the sales deficit rests largely on two acquitted conditions: COVID-19’s lingering reduction of bookstore foot traffic, and the resourcefulness of students who buy cheaper course materials elsewhere. In light of their departure from campus, the bookstore provider offered the school inclusion in its Follett Access Program. It’d mean students, in the process of paying for class, would pay an extra fee for textbooks — money that would reduce the overall book cost for everyone. Las Positas declined.
“We didn’t find that to be feasible for us, asking every student to pay a textbook fee to be able to have access to textbooks,” Foster said. “The second option was to move forward with the virtual campus store, which is what we ultimately decided to do.”
The plan for revenue supplementation — aside from tapping into unrestricted funds from the LPC Foundation — is presently lacking in specifics. Through commissions, the bookstore was financially supporting various on-campus programs. Athletics, theater and performing arts, and the forensics programs were three of the beneficiaries. How, exactly, Follett could fund programs while actively losing money is unclear.
“The bookstore had been providing support to a number of different programs here on campus,” Foster said. “We’ve identified that there are some needs and that we’ll have a loss of revenue to a lot of those programs.”
President Foster remains unshakably optimistic.
“We’re exploring other options to be able to fund the programs that we have in place,” he said. “So, that is a concern, but I think it’s also an opportunity for us to really lean into our entrepreneurial talents here as an institution to find ways to generate some revenue due to that loss.”
Foster expects, for students and staff, a relatively seamless transition from physical to digital bookstore. LPC looked to its sister school for an unofficial road-map on ensuring that be the case.
For Chabot’s Vice President of Administrative Services, Dale Wagoner, the changeover’s in hindsight. He remembers it with less enthusiasm.
“I wouldn’t call (the transition) smooth. There were fits and starts. I’ll tell you that the first six months weren’t real easy,” Wagoner said. “Now that we’ve been at it for a little over a year, it’s worked out pretty well. I think people have adjusted and adapted.”
One of the issues arising from the departure of on-campus bookstores concerns double-edged participation. When a professor suggests their students buy books on Amazon, or like sources, students participating in programs that provide low or zero-cost textbooks can’t receive the benefits. In other words, if professors negate their vendor — Follett, in the case of LPC — with the intention of providing a cheaper purchasing option, they sacrifice the ability for respective students to potentially receive free textbooks from the vendor.
“Faculty can do what they wish to do, but if they don’t wish to participate, it does hurt students,” said Wagoner, “and it will potentially affect our relationship (with Barnes & Noble).”
The yet unresolvable issue is a matter of merch.
“Our biggest thing that hasn’t been resolved is the swag piece,” Wagoner said. “You wanna buy a LPC sweatshirt? You go to the bookstore and buy it. What do you do when you don’t have a bookstore to buy a LPC sweatshirt?”
Without a general merch vendor to collaborate with the bookstore’s website, you apparently do nothing.
More pressingly, “Chabot realized that some students may not have an address to ship to,” President Foster said. “They ended up identifying a location on their campus that could receive the books and the students could just pick them up on campus. So for us, we would do the same. It would probably be our welcome center on campus. That’s one example of what we learned from Chabot.”
Across the state, brick-and-mortar bookstores are abandoning their posts. LPC and Chabot are two of countless victims. At Las Positas College, books going forward are purchasable at the virtual bookstore and available for pickup — for those who might be sans an address — at the Welcome and Basic Needs centers.
Olivia Fitts is the News Editor and Opinions Editor for The Express. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter @OLIVIAFITTS2.
