As a person who lives here sans any sort of vehicle, my most readily available retailers are Wilson Farms and the Cornell Store, and that’s it. While Wilson Farms is a prime spot for buying bananas that don’t cost a ridiculous 89 cents each (as they do at all Cornell Dining locations), cigarettes, and scratch-off lottery tickets, whenever I need to buy any other items necessary to my well being (pens with purple ink, shampoo, headphones, cough drops), to The Cornell Store I go. In all of its monopolistic glory and money-guzzling, it reminds me of one of those pillaging oil barons in political cartoons your history teachers show you when you’re learning about the Gilded Age in high school. I hate the Cornell Store. Here are 6 reasons why:

1.     The obvious one—the Anthropological Linguistics textbook that cost me $53 at the store and $23 on Amazon.

2.     The way they are often out of stock of popular items—like unlined moleskin notebooks and New Yorker magazines—for long periods of time. With a revenue that is probably close to the GDP of a small island nation, you would think they would be able to just maybe have a larger inventory.

3.     That their only apparel for sale falls into three categories: oversized and overpriced athletic wear that encourages students to schlump around and get fat, tacky “women’s wear” that has Cornell written in script or in pink, and ugly Vera Bradley bags.

4.     “Do you have a Cornell ID? No? A net ID? No? We’re just trying to give you a chance to win a hundred dollars, miss.” Yeah, and to conduct surveillance as to my whereabouts and consumer activity.

5.     Their “casual seating to let you browse through books,” which is practically on the line to pay.

6.     Their campaign to suck any sort of actual hipness out of the student body at Cornell by selling shirts and buttons that say “We are the hottest Ivy,” referring to our proud moment in the college rankings sun when some Newsweek writers in Dockers and short sleeved dress shirts deemed us so.