The College announced May 2 that it will be closing the Oberlin College Bookstore on Main Street and replacing it with a new Campus Store located next to Azariah’s Café in the Mudd Center.
The planned location for the new store is currently home to Mudd’s periodicals as well as seating for Azzie’s. However, according to the College announcement, the number of seats and tables will not change. Instead, seatig will be moved in order to reconfigure the space in accommodation of the Campus Store.
The current Oberlin Bookstore, which is operated by Barnes & Noble, will close in June. The Campus Store, which will open in fall 2025, will be operated by University Gear Shop, in partnership with eCampus.com, the official online bookstore.
“It’s correct that the available space in the new Mudd location is considerably smaller than that of the College Street location, and this is by design,” Vice President for Finance and Administration Rebecca Vazquez-Skillings said. “The old College Bookstore occupied retail space that was much larger than its retail merchandise needs; this was necessary in part because the bookstore required extensive space for basement textbook organization and storage. With the launch of our new online bookstore, there is no longer a need for such storage space.”
Thus, the new Campus Store will not shelve physical copies of books, unlike the current store. While books can be ordered to the physical store, the condensed store will primarily sell College merchandise.
The change in location came out of a need to improve the process of course material selection, the announcement explained, following years of requests from Oberlin faculty for a better system, as well as “shifting trends in student buying habits and how campuses operate bookstores nationwide.”
Prior to the College’s announcement, which clarifies that no seating will be removed, employees of Azzie’s expressed concerns over the minimization of space for cafe seating and frustration about the lack of communication between employees and the College.
“Taking out the seating in Azzie’s would almost entirely change our atmosphere,” College third-year Sydney Banks, a barista at the cafe, said. “It is more than just a cafe, it is a safe place for students. Taking that away simply to create an extension of the bookstore including merchandise is not at all what students want, nor our customers. On top of that, the transparency regarding the situation has been nonexistent at best.”
College third-year Claire Pearson, another Azzie’s barista, explained that Azzie’s staff members had first heard of the change when some papers circulated with the plans for the cafe, but didn’t know it was happening for certain until about a week ago, when someone came in to scout the space.
“It will definitely affect the working environment, which has already been dampened by mobile order only,” Pearson said. “[It is] just taking away more and more of the cafe experience to be more like a drive-through.”
Periodicals that currently line the walls of the cafe space will be relocated to another area on the first floor.
It is unclear as of yet what will happen to the space the bookstore currently occupies. According to the announcement, the College plans to “reallocate the space for academic programs,” but are still considering options and will wait until plans are confirmed to share them with the Oberlin community.
According to Director of Media Relations Andrea Simakis, UGS plans to extend interview opportunities to current employees of the Oberlin College Bookstore. They are also interested in hiring student employees.
Barnes & Noble was unable to provide a comment.
