When students first heard of the bookstore’s return policy this semester, we were outraged. Without a warning from the bookstore before the academic semester started, students felt bombarded with a seemingly new policy that left some of them with hundreds of dollars in unwanted books.

There was no warning last semester when students were buying textbooks thinking they could return them if they ended up not using them. There was no warning for the students who bought two copies of some textbooks, wanting to return the ones at the bookstore when their online orders came in.

While the official policy of the bookstore was not changed, the problem seems to lie in the new enforcement of the policy. No, the policy was not new. But having never been enforced in the past, it was new to us.

The policy makes sense from a business standpoint. Follett runs bookstores across the country. With students in every school buying textbooks and then returning them when their online orders came in, they wre surely losing a lot of time and money.

It just would have been nice to have been warned. A mass e-mail at the end of last semester would have sufficed. Not only would it have saved students money, it would have cut back on the bookstore employee’s headaches as well.