Cash 4 Books disappointing
February 5, 2019
Last semester, I decided to try out the Mercyhurst Bookstore’s Cash 4 Books program.
For those who don’t know, Cash 4 Books is a program where you can return the books you’ve bought from the bookstore for money.
I normally don’t buy any of my books from the on-campus bookstore.
I usually get them for a fraction of the price from Amazon or a similar site.
Last semester though, there were several texts which I needed to buy from the bookstore, either due to their exclusivity, their cost or due to my needing them immediately.
Obviously, I wasn’t expecting to get a fortune back when I went to Cash 4 Books.
They need to make money somehow, after all, but I was expecting to get something back.
Evidently, I set my sights just a bit too high.
I spent around $60 to $70 on books from the university bookstore last semester.
I want you to honestly guess how much they offered me for my haul.
Eight dollars.
They offered me eight solitary dollars for a haul of $70 worth of books.
I didn’t even take the money, I just kinda walked out of there.
I can’t imagine how angry I would be if I bought one of the truly expensive textbooks from the bookstore under the impression that I could at the very least return it later for a little cash.
If you turned in one of those $100 books under this program, you’d probably get back just enough money to get a medium-sized lunch at the Arby’s down the road, or, more appropriately, a few drinks at the Cornerstone.
I understand that you can’t give students all the money they spent back.
If you did that, you couldn’t make a profit, and the bookstore is ultimately out to make money for the university.
But this is just a ripoff that undermines the trust that Mercyhurst students put into the faculty.
Mathew Jury, '17 • Feb 8, 2019 at 1:33 pm
I can say I have had some good deals when I did the Cash 4 Books program when I was still a student. However, it’s no secret that some books you spend a lot on will rob you when you try to sell them back. I paid almost $300 for a Physics textbook and when I tried to sell it back, only $16 were offered back. To be fair, some of that money went to the MasteringPhysics program, but even then, you should at least expect to get a fifth of what you paid back if you paid over $200 for any textbook. Don’t even try the competing book vans that drive around during Finals Week. They offered even less for a lot of my books or they wouldn’t even take them. I will always appreciate the education I have received here and my professors were all pretty good, but the overall textbook industry is highway robbery.