The Miami University community needs to be alerted to a possible big change for the Oxford, Hamilton and Middletown campuses - a change that is shortsighted and disadvantageous to Miami's students, faculty and staff. There are plans underway to "privatize" our campus bookstores and thus start the outsourcing of Miami jobs and the depersonalization of Miami's culture.
Someone wants to turn over our campus bookstore to big business, and with that start Miami on a one-way slide to mediocrity. If this effort is successful, we will have a corporate-run bookstore with the impersonal service and (at best) average performance that these companies are designed to provide. Every decision in these corporate stores is intended to maximize profits that will go out of town to corporate headquarters or to private owners and shareholders. The number one goal of these businesses is to take as much money as possible from our students and faculty in order to fill the pockets of wealthy owners and executives — all this at the expense of competitive prices and the caring, personalized service of long-time, loyal employees. History shows that current Miami employees will either lose their jobs immediately or be squeezed out over time. These companies make their profits by hiring people on a part-time basis, or pay them a minimum wage without providing decent benefits such as good health insurance and retirement plans. They are like Wal-Mart but with high prices!
Poorly run bookstores do exist, but that is not the situation here at Miami. Our store is evaluated by thousands of student survey responses each year. The results are always very high, with ratings of 90 to 95 percent satisfaction for customer service, product availability and responsiveness. Yes, we are as concerned as everyone else is about the high cost of textbooks, but many Miami students appreciate our efforts to hold down prices by providing options such as used books, text rentals and e-books. Our mandate to keep costs as low as possible helps to provide a downward pressure on book prices for all of the stores serving this campus. This competitive advantage for our customers will be totally lost if, for instance, one of the two for-profit bookstores in Oxford were to be chosen to operate the Miami University Bookstore. Both are likely to be among the bidders for the contract.
Ironically, this seeming shift in Miami's mission is coming right at the time when our store is undergoing a renovation that has been badly needed for years and is being funded by dollars set aside from years of effective operation by Miami employees. Our store performs among the top 5 to 10 percent of college stores nationwide in controlling costs and returning funds to our university. After all of our expenses are covered, we provide about $1.5 million each year to the Shriver Center budget. We meet the goals set by the administration year after year and hold down the student fees needed to operate the center by some $250 per student.
The administration presumably will require the corporate chain store to provide the same money for the university, but in order to do this and produce their necessary 10 to 12 percent profit to send out of town they will raise prices, as will the other two stores in Oxford. Having no ties other than financial to the university, they will think nothing of under-ordering books, increasing mark-ups and failing to communicate with faculty. Their decisions will be made based on what is going on in all of their stores rather than this particular store. We will become just another link in a big chain. That personal touch for which the bookstore, indeed all of Miami, is known will be lost forever.
You might not know all of us — the people who work in your campus store. No one here is getting rich from our wages, but we are doing our best to make a living for our families and us while at the same time contributing to the local economy. With a corporate store, low-paid sales clerks will eventually replace us and our jobs will be gone for good. If you live in Oxford or one of the surrounding communities, be prepared for more good Miami jobs to be lost to big, impersonal corporate entities. Once the Miami community accepts the privatization of their university bookstore, it will soon spread to other areas. Our Miami heritage and traditions will have been traded for cookie-cutter operations that will be totally different from the Miami experience that we have provided and that you have come to expect. Do not believe the excuse that all of this is to reduce costs to students. In reality, outsourcing the Miami bookstore will raise costs to students while at the same time causing the university to lose money. What logical sense does it make to even consider this?
We hope the board of trustees and the highest-level decision makers really know our university and appreciate the people who work hard to set it apart from lesser schools. Hopefully they know this better than they know the corporate executives eager to gain access to Miami students' money. The chain stores' primary goal of making big profits will come at the expense of our campus culture, our long-term competitiveness with other high quality schools and, ultimately the community where we all live and raise our families.
In the past, President Hodge has shown his concern for us and a genuine appreciation for the quality of our work and the personal touches that we provide for our students and their parents. In these difficult times, please encourage him to keep Miami staff in Miami jobs. We can get through this without sacrificing our principles and without corporate middlemen latching on to what they see only as a "golden goose."
Once outsourced, it is almost impossible to reverse things and return to a self-operated bookstore. The talent and the know-how are gone. Schools that have made the shortsighted decision to hand over their bookstore to a big chain often find themselves battling to enforce a contract and get service quality up to an acceptable level. Why is it a battle? Because a public, not-for-profit university and a for-profit corporation have conflicting goals and always will. These contracts then shift between one chain operation and another over the years, rarely showing any improvement in the relationship or the performance. For Miami to make this mistake would be a prime example of trying to fix something that simply isn't broken.
Let's help President Hodge "Make Miami More Miami," not LESS Miami! Let's keep our store managed and operated by our own great people. Thank you for caring about Miami and the people who make it work.
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