I’m not breaking any new ground here when I say that depending on the particular life experience, the differing degrees of recall and accuracy you have.
I offer up as examples, a high school athletic career or early dating experiences. No doubt with each retelling, many of us come closer to achieving all-star status, or inflating the thickness of the long lost “black book.”
I unfortunately, fall under both categories, preferring a hazy and quick recap instead of rehashing every disappointing detail.
However, one experience I can recall with crystal-like clarity was the verbatim conversation that followed after phoning my parents to tell them how much my textbooks would cost during the first semester of what turned out to be many semesters in college.
In what I thought was kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison, my father bemoaned that the price tag of said books comfortably exceeded the cost of his first used car — a 1939 Chevrolet.
Not to be outdone, my mother pointed out that the cost was nearly double her tuition when she attended a community college nearly 20 years before.
Both asked in unison “Don’t they have any half-priced books there?”
That was perhaps the only time they were in agreement about anything.
But that was back in the 1970s, when “online” meant you were headed in the right direction and “webs” were things that routinely accumulated in dorm room.
Apparently, a pair of finance and accounting majors at Eastern State University in Pennsylvania felt my past pain — and millions of others students’ — and founded halfcollegebooks.com., a used books site founded to combat the absurd escalation in the price of college textbooks.
According to reports, these rising entrepreneurs came up with the idea while studying for an accounting test. Funny, all I ever came up with while studying for an accounting test was a migraine that required a six-pack of Excedrin to quell.
But I digress.
Halfcollegebooks.com was launched on the principle of "the most book for the buck." The store’s prices on average run about 15 percent less than the average college book store price, which, judging by statistics released by the National Retail Federation, is just slightly lower than what I paid for my wife’s engagement ring.
The NRF estimates that college students or in many cases their parents, spend nearly $9 billion annually on textbooks. Yes, that’s with a “b.”
If an accounting firm was as enterprising and proactive as these two students, they would wait at the gates of ESU with an employment contract and a pen.
Provided of course said students don’t become wealthy and famous in the meantime.
