Brianna Buziak
The Silhouette
All over campus you can hear the buzz of students and faculty alike talking about the upcoming homecoming game against the Waterloo Warriors this Saturday. If you’re anything like me, you got your ticket well in advance, but forgot one thing: McMaster gear.
Going to homecoming in any other colour scheme besides maroon and grey might give off the impression that your loyalty is with another team. To ensure that no one assumes my support lies with our competition, a trip to the Campus Store was definitely in order. If much like this devoted Marauder who left her colours back home, here are last minute items to add to your homecoming wardrobe.
The Triple Tee Pack
In addition to this being a great way to save costs, if you’re a first year and are looking for some staple items to contribute to your McMaster clothing collections, check out this pack.
For $29.95 (plus tax) you get three McMaster University t-shirts in white, grey and maroon. If you don’t need all three, split with a couple friends. Be sure to layer these shirts with a long sleeve shirt of another colour to keep warm, otherwise you’ll be making trips to DBAC every ten minutes to warm up.
Circle Crest
The Circle Crest sweater, available as either a hoody or a crew neck, will keep you warm and cozy during the long game. Wearing one of these will not make your outfit stand out (as almost every student has this sweater in at least one of the four colours available) but it is one of those timeless McMaster pieces that you will wear over and over again. Both styles are available at the Campus Store for $29.95.
Classic Marauder Baseball Cap
In the off chance that the sun decides to show up to help cheer on the Marauders, be prepared with the Marauder baseball cap. With an embroidered crest on the front and the “Fear the Bird” slogan on the back, you’ll be able to enjoy the game without worrying about a glare or an awkward face burn in the middle of October. The hat is $21.95 plus tax, but worth it to prevent your nose from experiencing an intense sunburn the week before Thanksgiving.
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All these items are articles of clothing that you have probably already seen around campus. This year, The Campus Store starting carrying items referred to as “cheer gear.” If you wish to stand out from the crowd at homecoming, but still show your marauder spirit, these new pieces may be for you. Or not…
MAC Daddy Fedora
The name pretty much says it all. For $8.50 plus tax, this polyester suede hat may not completely protect you from potential sunburn, but it will ensure you look like “that guy” while you watch McMaster defeat the Warriors.
Handlebar Moustache
Ever wanted to know what you would look like with a moustache, especially with Movember coming up so soon? This is your chance! Campus Store has a maroon handle bar moustache for those who wish to test out the facial hair waters while supporting their favourite football team.
Furry Leg Warmers
I’m honestly speechless.
The consolidation of course materials into one sales location has caused long line-ups. Here students wait to check out after shopping at the Campus Store.
Eliza Pope/Assistant Photo Editor
Titles Bookstore is no more and the Tank is closed. The new incarnation is called the Campus Store, and it is being billed as the “one-stop shop for everything McMaster”. The new store is simultaneously consolidating and expanding.
Renovations this summer allowed for the expansion of the Campus Store to include an attached textbook selling location. In the process, the Tank was emptied and all course materials were moved to the main location.
While the changes are meant to improve both the variety in products and the efficiency of the operations, the new design is not without its drawbacks.
Students seeking textbooks must enter the store through a separate, tented entrance outside of Chester New Hall. Shoppers are not allowed to cross from the main store into the course materials store, but are permitted to go straight into the Campus Store after purchasing textbooks.
The lineup into the new textbook store has been long during the first week of classes, at times stretching from the tent outside of CNH to the University Hall arch. In past years, first year students bought their textbooks at Titles, while course materials for upper courses were sold at The Tank. Long lines are a mainstay for McMaster textbook seekers, but the new system creates a line that includes all students.
The Campus Store has now, more than Titles before it, increased its focus on McMaster-branded consumer goods and clothing.
Donna Shapiro, Director of the Campus Store said, “I think that the name, the Campus Store, can now appeal to more potential customers than Titles could”.
Shapiro says that the university marketplace has changed a lot in the past few years. Because of the introduction of eBooks and increased competition in book sales, Campus Store needed to alter its product offerings to meet the market demands of the McMaster community.
Less than six per cent of overall sales currently come from general books.
Clothes now occupy four separate sections of the store and will evidently be a sales focus for the store this year. The consolidated store offers an expanded selection of McMaster clothing and other merchandise.
“More students are purchasing McMaster crested merchandise than in the past. The profile of McMaster as well as the Marauders’ ongoing success has created an increased demand for the products being offered,” explained Shapiro.
In addition to McMaster wear, the store has expanded and updated its electronics section.
While expansion was a major focus of the store’s renovation, the Campus Store no longer has a post office. The continuing decline of the use of “snail-mail’, along with the changes in the OSAP process meant that a full-service postal operation became inefficient and obsolete.
Shapiro said that the post office lost money each year, citing an operation cost of over $90, 000 last year.
Despite Titles' efforts, empty shelves in the Tank are a common sight at the start of term.
Titles is the students’ source on campus for all things textbook related. Although its main location is now mostly dedicated to McMaster paraphernalia and school supplies, the store’s primary focus is books.
With such a focus, it’s hard to believe that every September, students are faced with empty shelves and backordered textbooks.
“[Textbook ordering] is always a challenge,” said Lesley Mills, Accounting Manager at Titles.
Donna Shapiro, the bookstore’s director, explained further.
“We have to be very cautious when we place an order that we can make sure either we’re going to sell out, or we’re going to sell enough … so we’re not ending up writing off stock at the end of the day.”
Titles is responsible for ordering books for hundreds of classes for the year. For the fall semester, it oversees over 2500 courses and course sections worth of materials. A further 2100 courses and sections are processed for the winter term.
Even with such a high volume of courseware, Titles is very careful to be conservative, which contributes to its availability levels.
“We don’t end up with a lot of money at the end of the day, so we try and minimize the return – shipping costs are a fairly substantial cost,” Mills explained.
Titles collects about 20 percent of the cost of every book, but much of that money is put towards rent, shipping and staffing the store. Returns to the publishers are costly, said Shapiro. And that’s not a cost anyone wants to incur.
“The university has put a lot more fiscal demands on us. The whole campus is asked to be more fiscally responsible than they were historically in some areas. This is just one area where we know we can save money for everybody.”
The bookstore faces a number of challenges in determining how much stock to order. The four Titles book buyers must consider a course’s estimated enrolment and its actual enrolment, as well as the book’s sell-through in previous years. The store never orders books for 100 percent of the class, because not all the students will buy it.
Mills described how the first-year physics course had over 800 students registered, but only 200 textbooks were sold.
“There’s a huge issue there,” she said. She also noted that peer-to-peer selling is one thing that can cut into the sales.
Much of the store’s September trouble comes from communication issues.
“I think our biggest challenge with book availability isn’t determining the number that we have to have … it’s finding out from the faculty member in a timely fashion what it is they’re going to use,” Shapiro said.
Despite this, the store administration has given up on setting deadlines for professors to choose their textbooks.
“A deadline means nothing, because nobody adheres to it,” claimed Shapiro, noting that there once was a deadline set for mid-July for September orders.
The store is afforded more flexibility with the emergence of eBooks, however. This new kind of book production, while useful and environmentally friendly, has forced Titles and its affiliated publishers to evolve.
“It’s a whole new world out there,” said Shapiro.
“For a book world that hadn’t changed for centuries upon centuries, you’re seeing such rapid changes now that the publishers can’t even keep up with the materials that they’re creating.”
More of Titles' floor space is being used for merchandise.
Now that the shelves of books in the main area have given way to merchandise and school supplies, Titles Bookstore is going through a rebranding process.
“We’ve really looked at our overall sales and tried to allocate space to where our returns, where our margins, where our sales are coming from to make the floor reflect those sales,” said Donna Shapiro, the store’s director, who’s been there 21 years.
The store’s name might even change from ‘Bookstore’ to something like ‘Campus Store.’
“A lot more books are going to e-books, with e-readers, Kobo e-readers, Kindles … and so we just don’t have the sales that we used to have,” she said.
Even ten years ago, when Titles looked more like a bookstore, trade book sales (not course-related books) only got to be as high as 12 per cent of their total revenue. Although that number has dropped significantly, special book orders will continue to be a big part of Titles’ business. They’ve also added online e-book sales and in-store, print-on-demand book sales.
A new service they are offering is a textbook rental system. Be it for a four-month term or a four-week period during final papers and exams, students can pay to rent course books from Titles, rather than buying them. The program launched this spring, and will be continuing into the fall semester for a larger volume of students.
With the store’s reconfiguration, textbooks for summer courses are being sold out of the back of the main store rather than the Tank now.
As strange as it may seem to have a campus bookstore with no books on the shelves, that may be where Titles is headed.
“If you look at a lot of the independent booksellers, they’re going out of business because they can’t manage to pay their rent with the products that they sell,” said Shapiro.
“Titles, too, must respond to changes in the industry”, she said.
“I don’t know what [the industry] is shifting towards, but it’s definitely challenging for those of us in the business to try to figure out how we keep up with that shift.”
