E-Commerce Puts Its Stamp on College Living

In a 19th century basement at Brown University, cartons are stacked floor-to-ceiling, like columns from an ancient temple.

Huge containers house big-screen TVs, refrigerators, bicycles, computers, car tires and exercise benches. There are room-sized rugs and bulky boxes marked “office furniture.” Crates of books from Amazon.com are sprawled alongside packing envelopes from J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, the Gap.

This is the 21st century crisis that many colleges were unprepared for: mailroom gridlock.

Fred Yattaw, Brown’s mailroom manager, and his staff last year processed 130,000 parcels for a student body of 5,700. With hundreds of yellow package-reminder slips stuffed in student mailboxes, Yattaw said this year’s container count is running higher still.

Gone is the era when these package handlers seldom had to process anything larger than a box of cookies from grandma. Mailroom overload is the latest symptom of how wired American campuses have become.

At campuses across the country, many professors now hold online office hours. Calendar listings have gone electronic. The ride board -- where, only a decade ago, students cadged car transportation to anywhere -- has all but vanished, as have campus travel offices, because kids book their own tickets on the Internet.

But the overcrowded campus mailroom offers the most visible evidence of how a narrow and distinctive demographic sector known as college students lives and shops online -- and, apparently, spends like crazy. Born when personal computers came on the market, undergraduates today boast unprecedented comfort -- and competence -- with technology.

Especially at small independent schools such as Brown, many also lay claim to their parents’ credit cards. For these students, the 24-hour high-speed Internet connection is a cultural assumption, like toothpaste.

All around them, civilian America is shopping online with the same fierce enthusiasm of any Ivy Leaguer. But those parcels go to separate addresses. At schools like Brown, Yattaw said, “Everyone just seems to be getting more and more packages.” Since dormitories won’t receive packages, they all end up in the mailroom.

Recently, Brown sophomore Yuri Yashiro exchanged a yellow package slip for a carton that stood 6 feet tall. It turned out to contain a full-size piano keyboard. Scott Caldwell, a Brown mailroom manager, remembered a large box that spilled open not long ago, revealing a cache of erotic toys.

At Pomona College, one student had half a case of “pretty decent” wine delivered in care of the campus mailroom, school officials said. And one California school that insisted on anonymity said that after some students discovered a Web site for water pipes, boxes of bongs -- their contents clearly marked -- began arriving at the mailroom.

“It’s certainly overloaded here,” said Thomas Slobko, chief information officer at Occidental College in Los Angeles -- not the school where the hookahs were headed. In fact, he said, the mail has “increased to a point where it’s almost a crisis.”

Since 1995, he said, the number of packages delivered to students has quadrupled.

“The average [number of parcels] received per day has gone from 30-ish to 120-ish, and this is a very small place,” he said. “The place we have just to store the packages has gone from 7 linear feet to 30 linear feet.”

The explosion of deliveries to undergraduates is labor-intensive, Slobko said, causing friction between students and the mailroom “because the kids want things they’ve ordered right away, and sometimes the folks in the mailroom haven’t even had time to sort through them.”

To haul their plunder back to their dorms, students come in pairs, said Vernon McKenzie, office manager of the mail and copy center at Mills College, a women’s school in Oakland. In recent years, deliveries to students have increased about 20% annually, McKenzie said. Not only are there more packages, he added, but year by year the boxes seem heavier.

“Mostly it’s stuff they ordered off the Internet,” he said. “They come down and we let them borrow a hand truck. They usually manage to get it upstairs to their dorms, I’m not sure how.”

The package problem may be overwhelming for campus delivery centers. But Lee Rainey, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington, said the passionate consumerism of these undergraduates is a hallmark of contemporary campus culture.

“E-commerce has met campus life,” Rainey said. “Today’s college freshmen and sophomores were born right about when the first PC was marketed. They don’t know any other life.”

Richard Holeton is head of residential computing at Stanford University -- a job that did not exist only a few years ago. He noted that undergraduates have grown up juggling online activities -- including shopping -- “in ways that older people just can’t understand.”

Technology is “seamlessly integrated into their lives,” Holeton said -- so much so that, in addition to the typical resident advisor, each dormitory at Stanford has at least one “resident computer coordinator” to help students deal with technology issues.

But the lowly mailroom continues to rely on antediluvian procedures such as paper reminder slips to notify students that their latest CD systems or motorcycle engines have arrived on campus.

Yattaw, at Brown, said the priority is to move the merchandise. “We don’t question what students receive as long as they come and get it,” he said.

At the Brown mailroom package window not long ago, senior Jeff Tomlinson exchanged a package slip for a box 2 feet wide by 3 feet high.

“My old computer wasn’t working anymore,” said Tomlinson, a business economics major from Cheviot Hills, on Los Angeles’ Westside. “It was so much easier to order it online. It’s cheaper, and you can design it yourself with all the options you want.”

Tomlinson said he used his mom’s credit card to buy the new computer.

Shipping it to the mailroom, he said, “definitely made my life easier.” But of the mailroom staff, he added: “I’m not sure how it affects them.”

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Mehren reported from Providence and Trounson from Los Angeles.