In line with several area convenience stores, the Tufts University Bookstore has recently decided to stop selling all newspapers. The move was entirely an economic one, said bookstore manager Ron Gill. It was the result of slumping sales.
Gill said that students' unfettered access to free newspapers on the Internet, the free copies of The New York Times delivered to each dorm daily, and Daily newswires likely brought about the low sales. The bookstore's decision to no longer sell newspapers came last month after newspaper distributors voiced their disappointment with sales of their newspapers at the Barnes & Noble affiliate. Some of the major newspapers the bookstore used to carry included USA Today, The New York Times, The Boston Herald, and The Boston Globe.
After newspapers are delivered to the bookstore and are unsold, the distributors must reclaim the remaining papers and return them to the distribution center. As a result of competition, the return rate of the newspapers to the area distributors was well over 90 percent each day.
The rack couldn't hold all the returned papers," Gill said.
The bookstore would typically receive 30 copies of the Boston Herald and would have to return 28. "We would generally sell one or two, if that, and none on Friday or Saturday." Such marginal sales, according to Gill, could not justify the cost to the Herald of transporting the papers back and forth. Similar cuts to Herald sales in the past have caused the price of that paper to fall dramatically from 50 cents to 25 cents. When asked about the recent lack of newspaper sales, a Herald representative declined to comment.
Critics of the bookstore's decision insist that Tufts students must have access to more print news sources than the Daily. Senior Jennifer Bien said that while she did not usually buy the newspapers at the bookstore, she always read them when she was shopping for other things in the bookstore. "Students obviously are interested in what's going on, but no student is going to buy [newspapers] on a daily basis," she said. "It's a shame that the University does not provide newspapers for all its students."
Gill understands this complaint and admitted that he too misses print newspapers in the bookstore. "I'm a big fan of the sports pages and I love USA Today," he said.
