Vanderbilt University has entered into an agreement with Follett Higher Education to assume operation of the university’s bookstore at 25th and West End avenues.
https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2021/04/14/follett-higher-education-to-assume-university-bookstore-operations-june-1/
And now Texas Tech University joins the list.
Yes Follett did indeed have Vanderbilt in the 2000s. Always pushed the merch when they did well during basketball season
Acquire a big name university to show off on football Saturdays! SEC Football! Alabama or Georgia coming to town.
Meanwhile, back on the farm, the store will slide into an unrecognizable shambles. follett did this with Stanford 21 years ago. That store is officially gross. It was entropy in action. Was nice. Was terribly managed for a few years. Never recovered. It is dirty, sloppy awful.
Perhaps B&N lost money (maybe a lot of money) over those 10 years and didn't want to be tied to a black h..e for the next 10 years.
Perhaps this is another brilliant move by Follett to have a high profile store while net never to their vendors. When Follet is cut off, what will they be selling at the campus bookstores?
Why wouldn't this be a great idea?
Remember TL and BF have had planning with all BU's.
The future is so bright you got to wear shades!
That's some shameful stuff right there. Maybe a Vany student is bright enough and resourceful enough to self source academic materials. Other elite universities' students have done it. They're not the captive clientele they once were.
Yes, Follett had the contract for Vanderbilt from 2001-2011. It was a 10 year contract back then and it's a 10 year contract coming up.
https://vanderbilthustler.com/39779/featured/vanderbilts-bookstore-not-renewing-contract-with-barnes-noble/
Didn’t Follett have Vandy previously and lose the contract?
It’s a great university for follett to have on their resume.
Based on that article it would seem that Vanderbilt selected Follett solely on the premise that Follett is going to throw money at a renovation. Affordable textbook solutions my a.s, Follett doesn't do anything different from BNED as far as pricing on buying and renting....well...I take that back, BNED has a better price matching program - they don't make you pay full price for the book and then give you the discount back on a company gift card (a la Follett), they match the price at the time of transaction i.e. you pay the matched price. Technology integrations - as best as I know the only thing Follett has that BNED doesn't is that students can enter in their student ID on their campus specific Follett bookstore website and bring up their course list. While BNED doesn't have that specifically on their websites, they do have registration integration via the school's LMS/student portal - from the portal the student clicks the bookstore link, selects the semester, submits their schedule (which is already preloaded) and it redirects them to the bookstore website with their course materials list already loaded. Community Outreach - that's an ever changing thing and really as simple as the university going to the bookstore and asking, hey would you guys be willing to do xyz? Yeah, we'll see how this goes. I wonder how long the contract is for? Did Vanderbilt give Follett the standard 5 year deal or did they pull a TCU and get a 10-20 year ?