April 15, 2009

A textbook case of the high
cost of bargain hunting

With customer service, unique products and a commitment to its community, the Yale Medical Bookstore is working hard to stay in business and remain a valued YSM partner.

Don Levy (left) and Art Elliott (right) are using customer service and responsive merchandising to get their bookstore off the endangered species list.

When the Yale Medical Bookstore opened its doors at 320 Congress Ave. in 2001, “students were quite delighted,” recalls Manager Donald Levy. The store, owned and operated by Barnes & Noble College Bookstores, sold textbooks and supplies to members of the medical community, including the schools of medicine, nursing and public health.

Today, Levy calls medical school bookstores “an endangered species.”

The main threat: Internet competition and off-price textbook vendors. Levy says the “free rider principle” is part of the problem. Customers come in and leaf through a book to decide whether they want it. Then they purchase it online for a lower price. “They’re free riders,” he says, “but guess what? If you have too many free riders, there ain’t no bus.”

The Yale Medical Bookstore is hardly alone; only about two dozen medical school bookstores remain in the Barnes & Noble College Bookstore company. But its demise would be a loss as the bookstore offers a lot more than just books:

• Yale University employees receive a 10 percent discount on non-book items.
• Levy buys back used text books, paying one third to one half the list price, depending on condition.
• The bookstore orders books it doesn’t have in stock, often getting them within 24 hours.
• First-year students receive their first piece of medical equipment free from the bookstore—a pen light.
• The bookstore sells study aids for medical students, such as Spanish-language and ECG card sets. It also distributes free maps of the campus and downtown and sells children’s books.
• When cartons of used medical books are left by the store’s front door, Levy has them delivered to under-supplied clinics around the world.
• Levy supports the Second Year Show by buying an ad in the playbill.
• The bookstore offers free coffee to customers on Saturdays.

Much of the bookstore’s business involves non-academic merchandise. Greeting cards, magazines and general-interest bestsellers are popular among customers visiting patients at the hospital, while Yale products—pens, ID holders, key chains and glassware—have bailed out countless professors and students looking for gifts to give their hosts when they travel abroad.

For current students and alumni, a big draw is Yale insignia merchandise (sweatshirts, T-shirts, baseball caps) as well as diploma frames with the medical school, nursing school or public health school seals.

“We try to respond to what customers want,” says Levy, who runs the store with Assistant Manager Art Elliott. When students at the nursing school complained that they didn’t have rolled T-shirts like the medical school had, Levy ordered them. This year he added what he thinks will be “a keeper,” a T-shirt with an EKG line above the medical school logo.

“We’re like a mom-and-pop store,” he says. “We support the community in ways Amazon never could.”

The Yale Medical Bookstore is open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It can be reached at (203) 789-2124 or at www.yalemed.bncollege.com.

—Jennifer Kaylin

Photo by Jennifer Kaylin

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