Hey Gadsden – We’re here!
Scenes from the opening of our new location in Gadsden, AL. Serving Gadsden State Community College and Jacksonville State … as well as anyone else who has used books to sell!
- BUYBACK DATES: April 30 & May 1, 4, 5, 6
- HOURS: 8am – 6pm
- LOCATION: The Parking lot in front of Stevi B’s pizza; Look for the Foolish tent!
The Foolish tent looks like this.
From the front, just opened for business.
Can you spot the Fool?
Come by for your free sport bottle, while supplies last. And thanks for the killer response so far. We hope you’ll tell your friends about the great prices we’re giving.
Remember: When your bookstore drops to wholesale prices, our prices stay high!
Diaper Bag Advertising
This post could also be called “Commitment to the Cause.”
The Book Fool Street Team distributes thousands of bookmarks to get the word out about upcoming buybacks. This semester alone, we printed over 100,000 bookmarks to hand out at our Locations.
We love our Street Team because they’ll do anything to help us get the word out. This year one of our agents sacrificed more than just an afternoon:
As I was packing up to head out to campus, I realized my messenger bag is in storage (we’re about to move). I looked all over the house for something suitable, but all I found was a diaper bag. I swallowed my pride and grabbed it off the shelf.
To be fair, it was a pretty cool diaper bag from DiaperDude.com, but carrying a diaper bag without a baby was a blow to my ego.
Special thanks to Agent X* for sacrificing his pride to spread the word. Actually, a diaper bag may the perfect bag for the advertiser on the go. Lots of compartments and easy access with one hand.
Hey, it's better than a purse!
*If you haven’t guessed, Agent X, c’est moi.
How to Sell Your Books to BookFool.com
My friends, the rules have changed:
NO MORE COMPLICATED RULES!
Most bookstores impose complicated rules on the sale of your books. If you want the most money back, you have to sell by the third day of finals when the moon is full while wearing a blue shirt and penny loafers and blah, blah, blah.
Worst among these is the wholesale rule: Schools only buy the books they can sell again next semester. So if a professor changes editions or the school reaches their quota of a particular book, they will offer you a low “wholesale price” for it, regardless of its value in the used market.
BookFool.com doesn’t mess with wholesale prices or quotas. We’re buying books for the national market, so if a book is valuable anywhere in the used market, we can offer you a good price for it.
WE MAKE IT EASY
We make it easy to sell your books. No matter where you originally bought them, bring ALL YOUR BOOKS–textbooks, study guides, paperbacks–to one of our buyback locations. We’ll find their values quickly and tell you what they’re worth.
There’s no obligation and no pressure to sell to us. All we need to complete the transaction is your name and a picture ID (student ID or state-issued ID).
IF YOU’RE TIRED OF ALL THE RULES…
Give BookFool.com a try. Click LOCATIONS to see if we’re coming to a school near you.
And this semester, we’re giving away BookFool.com sport bottles at most locations. Get yours while supplies last!
Free while supplies last.
You make it look easy
Some people make it look easy. Some programmers can execute code that just plain works. Some accountants can make the numbers dance and the spreadsheets sing. They amaze you with their effortless success.
And some bike tricksters, well… [video link]
At BookFool.com, we have a certain affinity for bicycles. Our first website promotion was on the back of a bicycle at Ole Miss, and about 25% of our current full-time staff ride their bicycles to work.
Thanks to Danny and Inspired Bicycles for inspiring us with their mastery!
The Blue Monster
[ed.- Voting is closed and we have a winner! Come see the new names HERE.]
Help! As mentioned in the last post in which you helped us name a truck, we’ve got another one we could use your naming input on.
It’s a former bread delivery truck with a top speed of 60 mph (unloaded, with all the doors open). Sides of aluminum with dual tires on the back. Here it is before we applied the logo this morning:
Pre-logo
And here it is with the logo applied:
C
In situ at our Vandy location this year (logo still being applied):
Corner of 21st and Grand
Smoothing out the banner on the back:
We buy from out the back.
So what would you call this baby? Leave your ideas in the comments. Whoever suggests the chosen name will win a cool SWAG pack from BookFool.com! Multiple entries encouraged and appreciated.
-
How to Beat BookFool.com
I’ll be frank. This long post is about honor. It’s about companies and schools that operate with honor, dignity, and respect and about those that don’t. Since we opened our doors in 2003, we’ve found that competition brings out the best in most … but the worst in some.
THE SECRET
The best way to beat the Book Fool is to offer better prices and a better experience. That’s it. That’s the secret. Many of our competitors know this and have adjusted their prices accordingly.
We’re successful because we treat students with respect. If we can’t offer the best price, we can help them figure out where to get it.
We welcome students who want to compare our prices with the bookstore’s. And if they want to sell half their books to us and half to someone else, they won’t get dirty looks or snide comments from us. We’re just glad they found a good deal.
JUICY GOSSIP
The worst way to beat the Book Fool is by sending the campus police to pester us, harassing the students who come to us, or bad-mouthing us to whoever comes through your store. Trust us, this comes across as petty and only serves to cheapen the entire textbook industry.
You may think you’re rocking our world by calling the cops on us for a false charge. Well, really you’re just wasting their time and energy. We respect the police and other authorities. They provide for the safety of our communities, and we view them as friends. Plus, they have better things to do with their time than serve as your personal valet.
LIKE WHAT?
And now you, fair reader, would like to hear some examples of what we’re talking about. Bet you didn’t know the textbook market was so hotly contested.
Well, we have endured much wackiness from competitors. Students have told us that their campus bookstore refuses to let them compare their prices with ours, some by refusing to break down the total price book-by-book and some by simply refusing to price your books if it looks like you’re writing down the numbers. The behavior of an obsolete monopoly.
But we’ve also faced more serious, concerted anti-competitive behavior.
CONFUSED #1
In early 2008, we had the president of a school come to our off-campus buyback and make a scene in front of 50 (no joke, 50) of his students. He was red in the face and out of control, trying to intimidate us into leaving. We said nothing and eventually he left, but his students couldn’t believe what they had just witnessed.
“Was that Dr. X?” they asked. Of course they knew who he was, but they couldn’t believe a man of his age and status was debasing himself in public like that, like a spoiled child throwing a temper-tantrum in a grocery store.
CONFUSED #2
Late last year, we received an email out of the blue that offered us an odd deal. The writer said he would consider not starting an off-campus bookstore at one of our schools if we would entirely withdraw from a school we have served for years. Give up one school to protect another. He’s saying if we take a negative action (withdraw from a market), he will not take a positive action, one that hasn’t happened yet.
We had a debate over whether this was blackmail or extortion (it’s probably more like a Protection Racket), but the bottom line is that it’s anti-competitive, it smacks of collusion, and we won’t stand for it.
We ignored the unreasonable request and soon received another email from the same author promising to rain fire down upon us. He then began using Dillards.com to send us photos of women in bras–for what reason I can only imagine–which he signs his name to.
Classy move, G!
This is not how honorable adults in a free society behave. Fortunately, not all of our competitors act like this.
FOOLISH REBUTTAL
What I want to ask our misguided competitors is simple:
- Do you believe in the free market?
- Do you believe in capitalism?
- Do you believe in personal honor?
If you send your campus police to harass us, that’s not the free market at work. That’s state-sponsored commerce.
If you badmouth us constantly, how is that helping students get the best prices for their books? And how does that serve the industry as a whole?
If you send threatening emails to competitors instead of letting your prices and services speak for themselves, you’ve traded your honor for a second adolescence.
MESSAGE TO THE NUTS
Before you act like a clown and do something you might regret, take a second to think. Ask yourself why you got in the business of textbooks in the first place. To make a quick buck? Or to give students a fair deal on their used books and make their lives easier?
Let me make this clear: Most of our competitors are honest, hardworking people who let their prices and services speak for themselves and would never engage in anti-competitive behavior. The few I’ve mentioned above have simply lost their way.
SEE YOU SOON!
I’ll end with an idea that comes up often around the BookFool.com warehouse (and is expanded on nicely at My Super Charged Life):
If you’re making people angry or facing opposition, you’re either doing something really wrong … or really right.
We’ll let the students decide if we’re doing something right.
And we’ll leave it to Teddy Roosevelt to bust the trusts!
Buyback Manager Training Spring 2009
Thanks to our managers–both new and experienced–for attending the first ever full-day manager training at the warehouse this weekend. It was great talking with you, and I hope the info we conveyed will make your job easier this month and next.
A few shots from the day:
Having some Laughs
Telling war stories
Learning the program
Truck talk
The Ultimate Behemoth
[ed.- Voting is closed and we have a winner! Come see the new names HERE.]
What would you do with 27,000 lbs. of steel and redness? What if it had a siren, two industrial winches, and 10 bay doors for hauling around all kinds of cargo?
To tell the truth, we’re not sure we know the answers to those questions, but that didn’t stop us from plunking down a few grand for the mother of all delivery trucks. Witness:
Kris is the tiny dot behind the wheel.
Turns out this economy is a great time to get deals on giant diesel trucks. This is our second such purchase in ‘09. The first, a smaller, lighter bread truck, will appear in its own blog post when we get it back from the painters.
Anyway, we’ve got big plans for this behemoth. It will hold at least 4 good buybacks worth of books, maybe more. We’re also considering outfitting it to deliver books and supplies to disaster areas. It was once a fire truck (hence the siren and winches), so we think it will enjoy helping others once again.
Kodiak
But before we can take it anywhere, this beast needs a name. Something befitting its raw power and size.
What would you call it? The chosen name will earn the suggester some nifty Book Fool swag and the people’s ovation.
Kris surprised to discover how much this thing weighs.
Leave your suggestions in the comments. Multiple entries appreciated. Thanks!
The Unlikely HR Manager: Mistakes and Miracles 1
[Ed. note: This posts represents our desire to share our entrepreneurial mistakes as well as our successes. We're a small company with a lot to learn. What better way to learn than by making mistakes?]
In a startup, you wear many hats. I have very little experience with hiring beyond the Intern level, but when we realized in late ‘08 that we needed a full-time Operations Leader, I donned the HR cap and kicked off our search.
The way I went about searching for the right person was incredibly inefficient, as you’ll see below. However, my inefficiencies and mistakes were hiding unseen benefits, or you could call them Miracles, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger does in Mistakes:
… All in all,
what results from it is a miracle.
To avoid mistakes at any price
would be a mistake.
I started with Craigslist, where I tried to post the full job description. For some reason, the Craigslist system rejected my ad multiple times, so I set up a Scribd page with the job description and simply linked to it from the Craigslist ad.
This was our first miracle. Though I was annoyed that Craigslist wouldn’t allow me to post the full ad, the result was that serious job seekers had to follow a trail of links to get to the meat of the description and the proper reply-to address. This helped weed out the serious job seekers from the drive-by applicants who simply replied to the Craigslist ad and attached their resume. Right there, we weeded out 25% of candidates who could or would not follow directions.
In that job description, you’ll see we got really specific, perhaps too specific. I’m sure we scared off as many people as we attracted. This might be seen as a mistake by those who want the most possible applicants per posting, but we didn’t want the most. We wanted the best fit for BookFool.com. So we got really specific, and what resulted from it was a second method for screening.
We knew from their response right away if this person would be a good fit. If they could speak to us in a similar tone as the one we used in the job post, we knew they were worth meeting. Were they smart and ambitious but also a touch wry and self-deprecating? Could they use Google to look up Marduk and make reference to him in their reply? The job posting was specific and weird enough to attract the right kind of person.
In my next post in this series, I’ll share another startlingly inefficient process that proved to be useful in the long run. Remember, I have no specific HR training so YMMV. I have no idea if my practices are standard in HR or not. I may be reinventing the wheel, but that’s how I learn best.
Have you invented or reinvented a process from scratch? Have your mistakes led to hidden miracles?
