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Stopped by SBX today and saw they now have BEAT WISCONSIN t-shirts for $11.95.

I got a Beat The Buckeyes t-shirt a couple years ago and had fun wearing it in Cow-lumbus on the friday night. . .

Man I can't wait for Mad-Town!!!!!

Dayons_Den wrote:I got a Beat The Buckeyes t-shirt a couple years ago and had fun wearing it in Cow-lumbus on the friday night. . .

I got that shirt, too. It's been endless fun.

If you want some cheap shirts, wait a little bit longer and the "Win the West" shirts will be nicely priced, .

If you don't want to wait, I am sure you will be able to get some cheap merchandise at the Bee Gee Bookstore Liquidation sale. March 31 - April 2. 75% off.

Warthog wrote:If you don't want to wait, I am sure you will be able to get some cheap merchandise at the Bee Gee Bookstore Liquidation sale. March 31 - April 2. 75% off.

What's up with that? Why is it closing???? Anyone know???

I talked to the guy who does text books at SBX since he used to be the text book guy at Bee Gee Bookstore. He said they are a casualty of the construction on wooster. Their sales this fall were terrible because it was very hard to get to the store and the city/state didn't do a hole lot to help with design changers and stuff drug the process on longer than it shold have. Also, students are used to going to that side of campus since the bookstore is in the union there. So basically bad traffic planning and a change in the student walking patterns on campus did them in. I am sorry to see it go, but the prices between SBX and BeeGee were not that different.

here's the BG news story on the bee gee bookstore. he basically blames the big charge for killing sales.

http://www.bgnews.com/vnews/display.v/A ... 837f569a20

I dunno, they sometimes had cheaper textbooks than SBX, which is why I liked them a lot

I liked going there when I came into town for games because it was so easy to get to being on Wooster. I'd typically hit there once or twice a year to stock up on BG gear.

BGFalcons232 wrote:here's the BG news story on the bee gee bookstore. he basically blames the big charge for killing sales.

http://www.bgnews.com/vnews/display.v/A ... 837f569a20

My mom was really bummed when she heard about its closing, she said she always went there for supplies when she attended BG.

BGFalcons232 wrote:here's the BG news story on the bee gee bookstore. he basically blames the big charge for killing sales.

http://www.bgnews.com/vnews/display.v/A ... 837f569a20

During our last visit to BG (for MS Awareness Weekend at the Ice Arena), I talked with the owner of a sub shop in town and he was complaining about the BiG charge. There seems to be some underhanded treatment of the off-campus businesses.

I guess there was a bill in front of the State Legislature concerning the use of these "campus" charge cards off-campus. A push by local merchants to allow them to be used off-campus across the state. The universities pushed it back saying "Don't legislate this, we will let it be used off campus." Then Colleges set some enormous fee for a merchant to be able to accept the card. I think a $300 fee , plus a 25% cut of the sale. 25% is your profit. - Visa charges something like 7%. If you are a merchant, you can't do it. So the University may have some guilt in this matter.

However, that being said, who know that BEE-GEE and SBX were owned by the same company? Therefore is this really just a corporate business decision that has been waiting to happen?

I don't know much about Bee Gee, I've never actually been in it. But when I was in school what you're talking about, Tech83, was a pretty big issue. I know for a fact that UT students could use their meal plan at a lot of off campus restaurants that were near camps. Things like Taco Bell, Pizza places, etc. At the time our students were not allowed to do anything similar. I don't know how that has changed with the BG city bucks, but at the time I couldn't use my BiG Charge for anything off campus.

There was an article in the BG News at the time where they interviewed the Domino's Pizza owner. He was pretty adamant that he was willing to pay almost anything to buy all the equipment or whatever needed to be done for him to be allowed to accept those cards. I'm not sure if anything ever came of that, but if they're wanting a 25% cut then its never going to happen. As you said that is a LOT more than a normal Credit Card.

hammb wrote:There was an article in the BG News at the time where they interviewed the Domino's Pizza owner. He was pretty adamant that he was willing to pay almost anything to buy all the equipment or whatever needed to be done for him to be allowed to accept those cards. I'm not sure if anything ever came of that, but if they're wanting a 25% cut then its never going to happen. As you said that is a LOT more than a normal Credit Card.

I must admit that I'm pretty skeptical about the school asking for a 25% cut. From a business standpoint, the school would be biting off its nose to spite its face. By implementing a reasonable fee, the school would be setting up a continuing revenue stream. Why wouldn't they want to do that? They can't believe for a minute that they can control the universe of options that students have.

I'm just not buying that...

1987alum wrote:

hammb wrote:There was an article in the BG News at the time where they interviewed the Domino's Pizza owner. He was pretty adamant that he was willing to pay almost anything to buy all the equipment or whatever needed to be done for him to be allowed to accept those cards. I'm not sure if anything ever came of that, but if they're wanting a 25% cut then its never going to happen. As you said that is a LOT more than a normal Credit Card.

I must admit that I'm pretty skeptical about the school asking for a 25% cut. From a business standpoint, the school would be biting off its nose to spite its face. By implementing a reasonable fee, the school would be setting up a continuing revenue stream. Why wouldn't they want to do that? They can't believe for a minute that they can control the universe of options that students have.

I'm just not buying that...

But, remember the meal plans are forced upon all resident students. If you allow them to use that at off campus food you cut into your profits in that regard. If you set the cut rate so high that nobody is willing to offer the service, then you keep that business with your own campus food.

So then the question (from a business standpoint) is what is going to net you more money? If you allow the meal plan people to only eat campus food then that's all the revenue you're likely to get, but you're guaranteed to get all of it. If you make it reasonable for all students to use the BiG charge off campus then you may get more people using it than would typically buy a meal plan (thus more revenue to take a cut off), but you will also lose a great deal to meal plan kids that are now eating off campus.

In the end I'm inclined to believe that there is more money in forcing all meal plan students to eat campus food. I don't think that very many non meal plan buyers would use BiG Charge to buy food off campus, when they could just pay with a normal credit card.

I don't know if that 25% cut rate was a true story either, I'll take the poster at his word. I do know for a fact that when I was in school (graduated in '02) UT students were allowed to utilize their food cards off campus (had friends there), and BG students were not. Whether that has changed or not I don't know, but there must've been some reason why the University didn't want off campus restaurants to accept the cards. As I said the owner of Domino's made quite the stink about it at the time in the BG News as well.

Thanks to the wonderful archives at BG News (boy the Sentinel should look into this ) I was able to find the exact article I remember reading. Boy I have a problem this article was dated in Feb of '01, and I remember it fairly well... Anyways, here's the link:

http://www.bgnews.com/vnews/display.v/A ... _archive=1

According to that they were proposing to give a 20% cut of the sales back to the University. The article mentions some all purpose type cards, and I don't know if the City Bucks or whatever is the descendant of that idea or not. I haven't read the BG News on a consistent basis in awhile, so I'm not sure how the new system works, but from what I can gather the City Bucks still don't allow students to use their meal plan off campus, which is what other schools do allow.

I thought there was a difference in charging the card, (like at the bookstore) and using it for your meal plan. My freshman year I used my card to buy my parents gifts, they ended up paying the bill. If you force the studets to spend $750 to buy a meal plan, all that money ends up going to the university, in order for students to get their money out of it, they have to spend that 750 on campus. Now the card can also be used like a credit card and students can use it off campus. In the end the university would get 750+outside money. So it seems dumb to charge 25%, and not get usage of the card outside of campus.