Portfolioso.com Blog

Business lesson with Dr. Portfolioso, CEO of Portfolioso Industries. We will be discussing how to cut costs regarding book purchasing for a management class I am taking

So a week ago, I get an email from one of my professors before class starts. “I will be buying your books. Bring me $100″ Well gee, thanks a lot, that’s a lot of money. I’ll take care of buying my own books, not you, and here’s why:

So I get to class tonight and he brings us 6 different books. Me being an OCD control freak, come back and do some magical Excel calculations. First, I add up the retail price on the books. The professor claimed to have purchased these books at a 50% discount from a local mom and pop bookstore. So first I add up the retail prices on all 6 books: ($15.00 + $18.00 + $15.00 + $14.95 + $14.95 + $14.95 = $92.75). Add in about 7% sales tax and you’re around $100. Okay so this guy was completely bullshitting us about his discount, but at least the figures add up and he’s not stealing my money.

But here’s what pisses me off. I usually buy books on Amazon.com. So I do two more calculations. First, I calculate the cost of buying them new from Amazon, with free shipping if they were all combined: $21.15 + $9.75 + $9.85 + $10.17 + $10.17 + $10.17 = 71.26. Add some tax and you’re around $76.

But F that. I don’t need new pristine books. As long as I can read them, I will get them used – who cares. Normal professors list their books before the course starts, along with the authors and editions so I can grab them off Amazon, which is how I normally buy my books. So I added up buying them used on Amazon from various sellers. Including shipping, we’ve got: $8.94 + $6.98 + $7.98 + $8.18 + $8.54 + $8.17 = $48.79

Someone tell this mother fucker he owes me $51.21. This greedy bitch makes over $100,000 per year. I am poor. Cut me some slack, Jack. By the way, thank Christ this is the last semester I need to buy books. It’s all one huge sham.

Moral of the story: This “management professor” is a terrible manager because he can’t cut costs. Everyone knows you need to save money. Under my system, I would have saved $51.21. This is why this jokeface is only a professor of management and doesn’t actually manage anything in real life. Okay, this is only like $50, but in corporations, we’re talking millions. It’s the same concept though. People like him break this economy and drive companies to the ground.

eFollett is one of the most awful companies around. They exist for the sole purpose to rob poor college students by charging inflated prices for textbooks. At the end of the semester, they either don’t buy them back for real market value or say they have no value. Protip: buy and sell on amazon.com. eFollett will not get another penny from me and I haven’t been to that crook bookstore in two years.

So I’m buying my books for next semester and I can tell you right now, I want to bash my history professor’s skull in and I haven’t even met the man yet. Rather than assigning normal textbooks, I look on the booklist and see the following:

First of all, give me an ISBN, a real title (not the course title) and a real author. It’s doubtful these two books have the same title. The info above tells me nothing. Now I have no choice but to buy these two books from the bookstore because it doesn’t give me enough info to shop elsewhere. I absolutely hate when professors write their own books for the class. I hate it even more when it’s sent to Kinko’s and consists of spiral bound printer paper that they make the bookstore sell for $50. Morons.

Features include: a 1998 styled webpage, boring text links and a joke Asian guy in a wifebeater.

As usual, when my school attempts to do anything regarding technology, they get it completely wrong. Rather than wasting precious resources developing this rubbish, they should spend some time fixing the completely flawed school website, that was just recently redesigned into a broken linked, visually horrifying disasterpiece. They should be fixing our failure Luminis portal, which  was down all “weekend” (meaning it was down from Friday to Tuesday) for an upgrade. But forget about that, we need to focus on a social networking site for students and staff, because that’s of utmost importance.

“The success of Facebook and MySpace show that users want a forum to socialize,
engage, and learn – their way,” says Scott Barnett, director of Web Communications at Fairfield. “Fairfield LIVE was built on a robust platform and channels the best of the social media experience into one space – with the privacy and toolset needed on the backend that does this very wisely.”

Let me tell you something, Mr. Barnett: You are a moron. The success of Facebook and MySpace show that users want to use Facebook and MySpace – not garbage being developed by KickApps (anyone ever hear of KickApps?) My ass looks better than the school website, and you’re partnering with some crappy, fly by night social media company that pretty much sold you a version of MySpace. What are you guys blind? Can’t you see that it looks absolutely awful in comparison to Facebook and other modern web 2.o social media sites? Who is on the committee that worked on it and approved it. Apparently, it’s probably a bunch of freshmen that were brainwashed by the administration and think IE 5.5 is blazing technology! Apparently, if you are employed at this school and are involved with anything web related, the requirements include: complete blindness to modern web styles and design, a keen eye for 1998 text based websites, the ability to create text links and the ability to paste corny JavaScript effects into the HTML code of a page.

God knows how much this cost. The school is cutting staff, firing professors and doing everything possible to save a buck in this recession, but we’re rolling out garbage sites that no one will use. Get over yourselves. Save money and the embarrassment of releasing a site that might have been cool in 1998 on my 33.6k dial-up modem. Idiots.