Kudos to the CPH Bookstores

In college I hated dealing with the bookstore at Seward (not owned by the university, but by our foodservice company). The only thing decently priced their was CUNE gear (T-Shirts, gifts, etc). Their prices on textbooks were outrageous. They also regularly put out flyers that claimed that it was cheapper to buy and sell books in the bookstore.

That of course, was an outright lie. If you’ve ever priced textbooks, the bookstore is normally the last place you want to go. For my last two years at Seward I bought a total of three books from the bookstore. Everything else was purchased from Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Half.com. I even sold books online. In some cases, due to the market, I was actually able to make money on textbook sales. I made detailed spreadsheets and showed them to the bookstore manager but she continued in her lies. Oh well… I didn’t have to shop there.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I got to the seminary with the bookstore being run by CPH. I’d always had positive experiences in dealing with bookstore personel (at the Seward CPH warehouse sale). In fact, I really enjoyed getting to know the manager who came up from St. Louis. We still greet each other on a first name basis to this day. But what about the prices? I started pricing books and realized that whether I was buying a CPH book or a book from another publisher I was going to get a good price from the Sem bookstore. In most cases book prices were right at the online price or maybe a buck or two more. In that case the higher cost was worth it for convienence sake.

Another plus of working with the sem bookstore was their helpfulness. They always were willing to order books for me and were always friendly. In fact, I had a great conversation yesterday with one of the bookstore employees I’ve known for a while when I called to order something.

Overall… great job CPH. You have fine bookstores and fine employees.