Textbook prices to increase 237 percent
SAN LUIS OBISPO – Store clerks at El Corral Bookstore were solemn on Sunday as they put up signs announcing a 237 percent price increase on textbooks, effective this winter quarter 2007. Having no ladders due to budget problems, the clerks resorted to standing on each other’s backs in acrobatic pyramid fashion to hang signs up high enough, where they hoped enraged students would be unable to tear them to pieces in protest, just so long as they did not bring any ladders of their own. Numerous students that had secretly cheated their way through math classes their whole lives saw the signs and were confused about how such a large and uneven percentage would actually affect them.
“Where is the decimal point? Is this some kind of typo?” asked one puzzled student.
“237 percent wasn’t just a number we pulled out of a hat,” commented an anonymous El Corral manager in between oily bites of decadent caviar and large gulps of French wine. “The industry is bending over backwards to make improvements to these books, like re-releasing old texts verbatim with reprinted covers having newer edition numbers, increasing font sizes and adjusting margins to increase page counts, and creating labels and including plastic envelopes for accompanying CDs. The people operating the bookstore can’t give away these valuable tomes of knowledge for free when we have to *BURRRRRRRRRP*. excuse me. When we have to eat, too.”
Independent research showed that 85 percent of the time, accompanying CD’s are actually recycled failed disk image burns that have been illegally obtained by publishers’ lackeys rooting through the garbage dumpsters behind college dormitories. Though completely unmountable, publishers rely on the fact that 86 percent of the time, nobody even thinks to open those envelopes and waste their time installing the useless add-on price-bloating bullshit offered by them anyway.
Michael Meager, who asked to remain anonymous but whose name we included anyways, is a student whose job at El Corral is one of three he works to pay his own way through college. Mike described the situation with dismay.
“I work at El Corral during the day because it’s on campus, because I can make it to class in between shifts, and because I can steal all the textbooks I need from the unmonitored back room. But conditions there have really gone downhill. Lately they have assigned me to inspecting used textbooks and repackaging the ones that will pass as new in shrink-wrap. Plus there is a stupid old hat with a bunch of percentage numbers in it in our manager’s office, and nobody is sure what it’s for. Whatever. It sure beats my old job working at the Light House, where my primary duty was scraping food off of people’s plates, utensils and trays and rearranging it into salads for the next day.”
Managers of El Corral expect the rate of textbook theft to skyrocket, which is estimated to help boost revenue. Since so much budget money is already funneled into antitheft expenses and bribing lawmakers to set exorbitant fines, catching a would-be thief is on average more profitable than the sale of merchandise itself.
Eternally keeping its students foremost in its agenda, the Cal Poly Foundation has already begun work on a pamphlet entitled “So you think you can’t afford textbooks?” which will recommend various measures students should take to ensure they can buy the books they need. The high in production value list of friendly pointers includes ideas such as selling kidneys on the black market, donating blood and semen, wading through couch cushions to find loose change, and begging on the streets. The three-leafed pamphlets, which will be printed by El Corral press and sold in the bookstore for $9.50 each, will be a requirement for any student desiring full-time status.
