OMG! What a day!

Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the day before classes begin, one of the busiest days of the year for the University Store and Text Rental. All of this, and the day that the University experiences a campus-wide power outage which crippled the University Store and Text Rental operations.

We had 20 wonderful volunteers (pictured in the darkened store) who came down to help us out on this most busy of days. Unfortunately they spent much of their time in the dark with us, waiting for the power to come back on. Instead of tending to the masses, we cleaned, rearranged, and did whatever else we could do with no power. Thank you volunteers - the store hasn't been this clean in a while!

To our customers, we sincerely apologize for yesterday's problems, and our inability to serve you. We do strive to give our customers the best customer service we can every day, there are just some days we are thwarted. We will work hard the rest of this first week of school to assist you with your needs.

For those of you who don't know what happened. The University had a major power failure - some piece of equipment failed and needed replacement. The power went out at around 9am, and was on and off throughout the day - at least five or six times. In addition to that a generator failed to come on in a server room, where the US/TR servers are housed, thus causing us to have no computers, even while the power was on. All tolled, we were open for approximately 45 minutes, out of the total 7 hours we were supposed to be open.

Again, our apologies to those students and customers who attempted to visit us on Monday. We hope that it will be better for the remainder of this week.

Back to School = cool new stuff!

First and foremost, check out some of the cool new items we'll be stocking this semester! Erin, Jolene and the rest of the floor associate crew have hard at work buying great stuff for the spring! I'll feature a couple of things each post this semester.

Today's it's two women's cut tshirts. The purple tee has a side print - very new and hip this semester. They run small though! The gray long sleeve tee is also a first for me, a v-neck long sleeve hoodie tee. Very cool.

The beginning of the spring 2009 semester is one week away. While business is picking up, it's still a little slow. I believe that it will be quite busy by the end of the week though - Crazy Busy in fact!

As always I'm glad that the semester is starting again because while the slow times are really nice, they get boring after a while, and BTS is always a kick in the pants to get the semester started. I am also a bit apprehensive as we begin the next semester. After all, it's never the same, there's always a new wrinkle or issue that needs solving.

We'll be having a bunch of fun sales, and fun stuff this semester, including the Centers 50th anniversary celebration. Our key sale for the celebration will be 50% off everything in the store (excluding books), for 50 minutes, during the 50th hour of the week, and there are two of them. Should be fun!