The customer is always right

In real life, people often feel helpless. As Abercrombie raises the price of their jeans to $90, or dairy producers spill milk so as to raise its market price, consumers quietly grumble as they fork over the extra cash. I submit that the reason for this lack of change in behavior is that individuals act as, well, individuals. There is no great Borg Collective where everyone at the same time decides to drink orange juice or boycott Abercrombie. Perhaps the closest thing we have to a collective are giant email lists which can rapidly spread knowledge and produce change. (And these are certainly effective as was shown last year when Abercrombie and Fitch began selling tee shirts with Asian stereotypes.)

And now my point: if such institutions exist which represent large numbers of people, and thus economic power, then these institutions should be used to reinforce the first rule in business: the customer is always right. Tufts University is a case in point.

Tufts has almost 10,000 students, with most on the Medford campus. These students, along with faculty, all require certain necessities such as phone, food, electricity, and, of course, books and paper. Last year, I wrote a viewpoint ("Don't understand economics? Buy a book", Jan. 29, 2002) concerning the economics behind the price of books and argued that both the bookstore and Gnomon Copy have monopolies over Tufts. Over the summer, Tufts renewed the book store's contract with Barnes and Noble, who blamed the low buy-back prices, a primary concern for students, on professors not submitting their intent to use the book again. Once again, Tufts accepted this excuse instead of asserting the economic power of 10,000 students. Let's do the math, conservatively. Take the undergrads, about 5,000 students. If each student spends an average of $300 on books, that is $1.5 million. We buy books each semester, so that would be $3 million each year, just for the undergrads. Wow.

Of course, Barnes and Noble is a huge company and nets much more than $3 million each year. Even when you take into account that the contract is for several years, Barnes and Noble would not go bankrupt without Tufts' business. But think of how significant Boston is with over 60 schools. Even if Barnes and Noble only held a few of these schools' contracts, would the company notice if they started to lose their market share in Boston? Oh yeah. (You can figure out what we could do to Gnomon.)

Let's look at a few other examples. PaeTec, which provides phone and cable television service on campus, charges high fees for basic services. And if a problem occurs, how good is the response? From what I have seen, not very. Think of all the phone numbers this university has, and how much money that must cost. The same goes for OneSource, the janitorial service. Here is a great example: general contractors. Each time Tufts builds a new building, it has to hire a myriad of people, from architects to engineers to plumbers and electricians. While I am sure that Tufts' construction department, operations, and facilities are all cognizant of cost, and take great care to only get the best people for projects (I know some of them and they are really good), they must also always be ready to flex the university's muscle when the contracted individual adds cost and time to the project. If our option is to either keep someone who was not able to keep his end of the contract (barring actual problems) and having to wait longer, or to fire that person, send a message of intolerance to inefficiency, and have to wait the same time to get a new person, I choose the latter.

Janet Reno lost her bid at the Democratic nomination, so we will never know if her plan would have worked. However, just as I wrote at the end of my previous viewpoint, I urge the university to take action and use its economic muscle to obtain the best deals for the institution. We are the customer, we have the money, and we are right.

Daniel Mandell is a sophomore designing a plan of study in Public Policy.