At California State University, Stanislaus, (Stan State), the Barnes & Noble College Bookstore is expected to carry the necessary amount of textbooks that professors order according to the amount of students expected to be enrolled for the semester.
With school back in session, it means finding your hidden classes, finalizing your class schedule, debating on buying a parking permit and inevitably buying/renting your stack of textbooks.
When it comes to textbooks, Stan State professors are told to send in an order of their required or recommended books so that the bookstore can carry them in store for those students to purchase.
But according to some professors at Stan State, the bookstore fails to uphold their promise.
“I honestly don’t know why they don’t order enough,” Dr. Veronica Dawson, Assistant Professor of the Communication Studies Department, said.
“I know that my students this semester don’t have their textbook the second week of classes,” Dawson said.
“They were told the bookstore is sold out of the book, and that since I am the only teacher in the department who uses this textbook they only ordered about five, as that is how many students have their books,” Dawson said.
Dr. Keith Nainby, Department Chair of Communication Studies, shares the same concerns with Dr. Dawson.
“Sometimes I come to class and ask how many students have the books on the first day or second day, and it is routinely the case that there is not a match between how many books I ordered and how many are in stock,” Dr. Keith Nainby said.
The professors have a sense of loyalty to the campus bookstore considering they place their orders through them, but when their order falls short they begin to lose trust with them.
“I don’t generally like to recommend that my students look elsewhere, such as Amazon, to purchase their books, but I had to do it last night because we have a quiz next week and students need to be prepared,” Dawson said. 
Students who are in a rush to complete their homework and need their textbooks as soon as possible go to the bookstore expecting to buy it right then and there. To their dismay, they are sometimes turned away due to lack of stock and proceed to buy their books from elsewhere.
“I actually did just have that problem. The book I need later, they don’t have it so I have to order it [somewhere else],” Oscar Casillas (sophomore, Agriculture studies) said.
In some cases, the bookstore and the professors have a lack of communication.
“I know that some professors put books in their syllabus, but won’t turn that order into the bookstore, so the bookstore doesn’t know to order it,” an anonymous campus bookstore employee said.
Another situation students find themselves in is pre-ordering textbooks from the bookstore, receiving a confirmation email, but then receiving another email stating that they do not have the book anymore.
“I get them [campus bookstore textbooks] every year. I never had any issue ordering them. Just sometimes they were backordered and I had to tell them and they had to contact the distributor and it got fixed,” Parmen Dillain (junior, Biology).
“Some teachers are cool they’ll give you a week to get your books and sometimes they’ll start right away,” Dillain said.
In the Spring semester of this year, the bookstore also misprinted graduation stoles that were sold to students. Once it was acknowledged, they placed a new order of stoles that eventually got replaced by the grammatically incorrect ones.