First of all, you’re welcome for last Monday night. You guys went to a few too many classes on Monday, so I let it get kinda close. Fortunately, a few bros threw down some brewskis on Randolph’s bench and tipped the scales in your favor.
Second, where I’m from, there’s a sporting goods store called “Play It Again Sports.” A friend of mine once told me that the store’s employees go out “finding” sports equipment around the city and put it on sale as “previously owned.” So he said, the store got its name because you would quite literally buy back your own sports equipment in order to play with it again.
Even though my friend was almost certainly lying, his idea is pretty brilliant. It really is a remarkable business model: little overhead, no costs of production and almost no labor. Why can’t the economics department teach you more useful things like this?
Instead, I, using my hard-earned… I mean, hardly-earned state-school education, will help you elitist folk out a little bit. This could be my best revenue-producing idea ever. If only Duke listens to this one, it’ll profit an untold amount. And we know y’all need it, with all the budget cuts around campus recently—LDOC T-shirts cost money? How much money? $3 to $5? That could get me like seven Swedish Fish from the Lobby Shop.
Provided you haven’t been living in a balloon for the past few years, you know that Duke has some financial troubles on its hands. Don’t worry, this isn’t another one of those anti-union columns (although they’d stop complaining if they knew how I paid my workers).
I don’t even have a problem with unions. Especially because every union I’ve recently encountered has lost its bite. It used to take something to break up a union. Now, all you have to do is have a few mysterious disappearances and unfortunate accidents—and ta-da! Nobody mentions they can’t afford to buy bread or get health care. Not to mention the surge in productivity that helps you business managers pay off your yacht.
So since Local 77 is definitely staying in town, we gotta get a little creative in order to make up for the slack in productivity. We should just take a hint from my buddy and his ideas on sports stores. Residence Life and Housing Services needs to establish a Duke Thrift Store in the Bryan Center where they sell back all of the items that they’ve taken out of bathrooms and hallways.
Half-full bottles of shampoo and toothpaste for full price! The kids’ll pay. They already pay hiked fees for everything else on campus. All they have to do is swipe their money cards, which, in any case, hardly count as real money anyway. And plus, the Duke Thrift Store’s goods are gonna have sentimental value, adding at least another dollar onto each price. Who doesn’t get emotionally, if not physically, attached to their beloved bottle of Herbal Essences? Have you seen their commercials? Those ladies don’t need a date for years after they’re done shampooing.
RLHS can also get Duke Dining in on this thrift store extravaganza, and they can sell all the food points they somehow “acquire” at the end of the school year. Not to mention the Marketplace swipes that “disappear” at the end of each week. Just think of the demand for food points that cost 90 cents on the dollar! For those of you who dropped Econ 51, it’d be pretty damn high. For you wannabe math-types who withdrew from Math 32, it’s called infinity.
After the thrift store gets started and Duke gets used to exploiting its students even more, we could potentially get Director of Dining Services Jim Wulforst to take some classes at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, where he could learn that, provided you aren’t in business with yours truly, “acquiring” money from students is not the way to get back into the black. Everyone knows that’s what the day after Thanksgiving is for.
The Joker will dance to this beat and hold a lover close.
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