Stanford University Bookstore — Attraction in Palo Alto

We've ventured to several of the US best and finest Universities and Stanford kind of underwhelmed us a bit.

We took the train down from San Fran to Palto Alto station which was easy and about 1 hour. It looked like a decent walk from the station to the University campus but don't be fooled by google maps. We started the walk on a very warm day then realized we were nowhere near it so we went to the shopping centre near by (really good one too by the way) and then had to grab a Lyft - there is a bit of distance between it all.

Stanford is HUGE. really, really HUGE. Navigating it was like a maze. It's so vast.

The bookstore with all the merch was a little lackluster compared to Harvard or UCLA. There's a lot of options but it's very pricey and a lot of repetitive products. There's also a lot of brand products with UCLA logos which don't really scream UCLA.

The upstairs cafe service was really friendly :) Although the people serving us really gave us the impression, they did not want to be working that shift.

Glad we came but wasn't...

I am a researcher at Stanford and going to Stanford bookstore for more than 4 years. I bought both my MacBook Air, my husband’s MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro from the technology center.

Recently I had a very bad experience while doing a trade-in of the 2017 Mac Air 15’’ in the technology center. When I was buying the MacBook Pro I was told that I can do the trade-in of my old Mac within two weeks. I did the trade-in online as suggested and brought the receipts with me.

But a manager named Trey first told me that it is not possible to apply any trade-in on the existing purchase even if it is mentioned in the receipt. It was just the beginning!! Then, he agreed to do the trade-in but offered only $74 for the Mac Air 15’’ which was in a very good condition and I traded-in the laptop at Apple store for $330. He offer $150 for MacBook Air 11’’ which was again traded-in at Apple for $250.

I am not sure from where he invented that $74 price which was not even in Stanford bookstore trade-in link. I don’t expect this crazy behavior from...

The idea of a newly purchased book is to be preventable, preserved and last. Many bookstores place stickers on book covers, but here they put such stickers as if you are never supposed to remove them! Peeling them off completely destroys the book cover. Not only that - they also put many stickers on top of each other to make the experience even more terrible. In top of that, they put white stickers (?!?) on the barcodes, which are technically unremovable! Books I've purchased are ruined because of that! They have to reconsider the stickers they put, how many of them, where and how. A bookstore that doesn't know or try to preserve the books it sells is a total failure! Learn from Books Inc - they also put stickers, but know how many, where and how, so peeling them off doesn't destroy your newly...