Retailer’s Con, at the academic year start

At the beginning of a new academic year, all students in a school need to procure their new books, notebooks and stationery. Some schools just provide a book list and the parents go from place to place to procure the material. While other schools point the parents to a particular book store that the school might have tied up with. And the third category of schools tie up with retailers, and the latter open up a book stall inside the school premises for a few days.

The last category sees the most amount of blatant cheating. Here is an example from one of the book distributor retailers in Bangalore - Subhas Books. Not that they have a great reputation for doing clean business even otherwise in the market. Subhas books sells their wares in many schools in Bangalore. Their overall invoice (and packing list) is broken down to books as one category, and notebooks and stationery as the other. The example that I use is of a UKG invoice in a CBSE school, where Subhas Books supplies. The books are individually priced at MRP, which is alright. The other category which is priced above Rs 1000 is where the cheating happens. The branded stationery totals up to a little more than Rs 400 (from the MRP labels). The other material remaining are six notebooks (school branded but without MRP), one color paper packet, some labels, brown plastic covers and a school diary (both without price). This implies that the remaining material costs close to Rs 600 per the retailer, which is totally impossible!

This might not sound very untoward to you, or maybe it does. If you have experienced something like this, do write in to us. We will publish the names of these retailers, and the schools too.

Unscrupulous book retailers to avoid:

• Subhas Books - Bangalore (they sell at Royale Concorde International School)