ASUCD Book Exchange
According to Davis Wiki, the ASUCD Book Exchange program is a great way to eliminate the middleman that rips students off on used textbooks (which happens to be the campus bookstore). The Wiki entry provides an example of how the program works:
“Joe buys a new book from the bookstore for $130. After the quarter is over, Joe could sell the book back to the bookstore and get $50. The bookstore would then turn around and sell the book to Yolanda for $90 plus tax for a total of $96.98.
However, Joe decides to fight the man and sell his book using the ASUCD book exchange. The book exchange tells Joe the used price ($90). Joe decides to set his price at $75.
When Yolanda goes to the book exchange to buy her books, she picks Joe’s book and pays $75 for her book and saves $15 off the used price at the book store and doesn’t even have to pay tax! Yolanda saves a total of $21.98. After the Book Exchange is over, Joe goes in and gets his $71.25, $21.25 more than he would have made had he sold it to the bookstore!”
After a few years of getting ripped off by the bookstore, this seems like quite a deal, right? Well, there is a catch. This program requires subsidies to run. Would you like to guess where this money comes from? The students of course. The ASUCD uses undergraduate fees to subsidize the program. Basically, in order to provide you with cheaper textbooks, they spend your money (in the 2008-2009 school year, they spent over $17,000).
There are businesses that actually make a profit doing this but somehow the ASUCD managed to turn a profitable venture into one that requires subsidies. Sure, you might argue that the fees for services are lower because of the subsidy, but why not find a middle-ground between charging higher fees and needing subsidies to run? That is the kind of advantage a not-for-profit program has over a quest for profit.