UWT bookstore is closing. Here’s why and what students and others are saying about it

University Book Store serving University of Washington Tacoma is set to close its physical store this week after having an on-campus presence dating back to the ‘90s and the start of UWT.

Store officials insist they will continue serving students with its online store. This quarter it’s offering free shipping.

The effective closure date for the site, 1754 Pacific Ave., is Friday (Jan. 13).

The store said on its website, “Students, faculty, and staff can continue to order course materials, supplies and Husky gear through the ubookstore.com website.”

Chancellor Sheila Edwards Lange announced the closure in a statement posted on UWT’s website Dec. 16.

“Although the physical location is closing, the University Book Store will continue to be a part of the campus community moving forward,” she wrote.

“The Tacoma store has been with us from the beginning in 1990 and has been a wonderful partner over the years. It was one of our first retail tenants when the permanent campus opened in 1997,” the chancellor noted.

At least one student told The News Tribune they felt the loss of the brick-and-mortar retail store was unfair to the Tacoma campus, even with the online alternative.

“I’m upset because it doesn’t make sense that ... I come to a college that’s $4,000 every three months, and we’re not going to have a bookstore but the other campus does,” said Yesenia Scearcy of Puyallup.

University Book Store’s main store is at UW Seattle’s campus.

The Tacoma closure follows the University Book Store’s shutdown of its store at the Bothell campus last June, with students there also directed to the online shop.

University Book Store operates as a separate for-profit corporate trust from the university, and its workers are not UW employees.

Trevor Peterson, chief operations officer for the University Book Store, told The News Tribune via email Monday that the closure “most directly relates to the changing model of textbook delivery, which has always been the core portion of our business in Tacoma.”

“During the pandemic, we began housing all of the Tacoma course books in the flagship Seattle store and having the students order them from our website,” he wrote.

He said the model worked “very well, so when I made the decision to continue with the model, the need for a physical presence on Pacific Avenue became less critical.”

Students interviewed Monday at the store told The News Tribune they come to the store for snacks and course printouts, among other items.

Peterson noted that UWT officials have been “excellent partners with us and we have been working together to ensure optimum service to the entire campus community.”

“This quarter we are shipping the students orders for free to their homes, and the University recently devised a plan so the students can opt to have their orders shipped to campus for pick up if they prefer,” Peterson said.

He added that the campus convenience store is working with the bookstore “to sell crucial student supplies that we provide for them.”

Peterson wrote that five store employees were affected by the closure, one full-time and four part-time workers. The chancellor’s announcement noted all had been “offered the opportunity to fill vacant positions at the University Book Store location in Seattle.”

Only two will be headed north, according to Peterson.

“The full-time and one of the part-time employees have taken positions at the Seattle store,” he wrote, “but since the part-time students are UWT students, it did not make sense for the others to travel to Seattle for work.”

DOWNTOWN SCENE CHANGES

Ben Mauk is associate director of campus planning and retail operations. In an interview Monday, he told The News Tribune that “this is a really painful time,” with the closure.

A decline of enrollment coupled with the pandemic loss of downtown office workers who are still not making a big return reverberates as the list of retail and restaurant closures in the area grows.

UWT’s numbers show 4,801 enrolled in autumn 2022, compared with 5,330 enrolled the same time frame in 2019.

As for fewer students, Mauk said, “Obviously, for something like a student bookstore it’s a bigger piece of the puzzle. For other businesses ... I think the impact on students not being here versus the impact of downtown office workers not being here is very, very different.”

Mauk noted that the store’s emphasis on online textbook sales ultimately led to the closure, adding it was already “benefiting from discounted rent and was working with UW Tacoma to redefine its business model and retail offerings/experience.”

“However, at the end of the day, the Book Store decided to focus its efforts on serving the UW Tacoma community via online sale,” Mauk said.

He pushed back on criticism that UWT was charging too high of rents for businesses.

“The deal structures that the university has on Pacific Avenue are typically at the lower end of market,” he said.

In trying to drive campus experience, advance economic development in downtown and generate a “market aligned” return on investment from the university’s real estate holdings, he said it was inevitable the goals “come into tension with each other.”

“The way that we try to balance that is to create rent structures that will help incubate businesses ... managing that within what’s considered a market rent. But also ... if tenants are having difficulty, we are only too happy to work with them,” he said.

“That has very much been the case since March 2020 as the university has waived and restructured rents and suspended other lease requirements to help tenants through these difficult times,” he noted.

He said some tenants have had to leave even when the university could offer “significant discounts, and it’s still not enough,” he said.

“We’re also dealing with a period of ... very significant inflation, and wage increases and whatnot. And those things together, sometimes just make it too much for a tenant to continue,” he said.

Hello Cupcake, which launched nearby at 1740 Pacific Ave. in 2007, closed Jan. 8, blaming lower foot traffic and staffing challenges among other economic hardships as pandemic relief funding wound down. The store saw lines out the door on its final day of operation Sunday.

“They were a much beloved business, and the owner was really good; a really, really talented business owner,” Mauk said. “I think between between rising costs and lower foot traffic, it made it very, very difficult.”

As for the future with University Book Store, Mauk said UWT was “working with them to figure out what their presence might still be moving forward ... also possibly having some kind of a temporary or pop-up presence throughout the year. They might come in and have a big sale on Husky merchandise or something like that.”

“It is disappointing for campus not to have a permanent Book Store presence, but we look forward to finding other ways to work,” he added.

The loss of one store can spawn another retailer’s opportunity, as the university hopes to attract another retailer or restaurant to the site, Mauk said.

“There is now available a high profile end-cap retail space at the Pacific Avenue gateway to campus,” he noted.