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INSIDE n PERSPECTIVES: One student relates 5 the painful experience of losing a parent
Baseball loses weekend series to Stanford
DETOUR: “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” pre9 nmiers Friday at Plummer Auditorium
—see Sports page 19
T U E S D AY
Vo l u m e 7 2 , I s s u e 1
Fe brua r y 6 , 2 0 0 1
Power crisis threatens nCAMPUS: Potential for blackouts forced campus to shut down for the first time in 40 years By Samantha Gonzaga Daily Titan Copy Editor
Spring semester has more to contend with than the nuances of adding classes and dealing with limited parking spaces. California’s energy crisis that first struck last summer and again this winter has placed Cal
Shoppers encounter dim
State Fullerton in a state of readiness in the event of a Stage Three alert. For the first time in 40 years, the school was forced to close down on Jan. 11 due to the high possibility of an energy interruption. The university closed at 4 p.m., and although intercession classes were not canceled, campus staff was forced to leave early. “There was a high possibility that we were going to be blacked out,” said Tom Whitfield, director of Environmental Health and Instructional Safety. “It was for precautionary purposes, to avoid sustaining a blackout.”
As the semester commences and solutions for the state’s energy dilemma provide little alleviation, campus committees are looking for ways to prevent another shutdown. Groups involved in decision-making processes like Environmental Health, Public Safety, Physical Plant, and President Milton Gordon find themselves weighing the effects on academic and financial levels. Evening classes run the bigger risk of being caught by rolling blackouts, even perhaps cancellations. Students returning from winter break have been greeted with dimly lit hallways in classroom buildings and offices and elevator doors
posted with signs encouraging the use of stairs. With the unpredictable energy supply, conservation methods have been implemented on campus grounds. “We have shut down as many lights as possible without presenting any hazards,” said Willem Van der Pol, director of the campus Physical Plant. “Our boilers and chillers take up a lot of energy, so we’ve been using them differently. Rooms are cooler than usual...life is bearable, but not comfortable.” Campus shutdown also rides on another consideration — the safety
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DAVID RIVERA/Daily Titan
Evening classes face cancellation in the event of blackouts.
Web bookstores’ popularity drops
Whoopi shines!
nCOMMUNITY: Fullerton businesses react to California’s energy crisis
nINTERNET: Visitor hits for online textbook stores decline after a year of media hype and flashy promotions
By Samantha Gonzaga
By Darleene Barrientos
Daily Titan Copy Editor
At the Ralph’s grocery store on Yorba Linda Boulevard, food aisles are no longer fully lit with fluorescent lighting. Its freezers still run: the quality of the food cannot be compromised in spite of an unstable power supply. Manager of Operations Todd Totman would rather have customers shopping in a dimly lit supermarket rather than buying warm frozen food. California’s energy crisis has forced businesses to re-prioritize their power usage. For most businesses, this means cutting back on lighting, which reaps significant savings in budgets and keeps power grids from overloading. Conservation methods being employed range from leaving unused sections in restaurants dark, to having every other aisle lit in grocery stores. Totman has not seen any changes in the volume of customers that come into his store. Employees know that office lights need to be turned off when no one is inside the rooms. The only thing that remains unchanged is the parking lot, which had not undergone any cutbacks for safety purposes. “In about half the places that I go to, I notice that only half the lights are used,” said Michael Smith, a new Fullerton resident. “I think that will hardly, or not at all, dissuade consumers. We understand why it’s like this, and personally, I’m thankful that this is all that we’ve got to bear with.” While rates that consumers pay are still capped, economic analysts are already anticipating a rate hike when the expiration of deregulation unfreezes them. The way Southern
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Daily Titan Production Manager
LORRAINE DOMINGUEZ/Daily Titan
Whoopi Goldberg headlines the CSUF annual fundraiser, Front & Center, at the Arrowhead Pond Saturday evening, along with Walter Cronkite and Jane Goodall. —See page 3
During 1999 and the early part of 2000, online textbook stores seemed to be a student’s best friend. Not only did these companies quote cheaper prices for books, they kept users happy with games, interactive chat, message boards, sweepstake contests and a variety of other features offered on each particular web site. Cal State Fullerton students didn’t even have to go online to enjoy the perks that a particular Web site wanted to offer. During past semesters, VarsityBooks.com representatives clad in brightly colored jumpsuits handed out bright orange nylon bags stuffed with promotional materials and samples from companies like NesCafe, America Online, and eBags. Meanwhile, BigWords.com representatives literally scrawled their name throughout the campus in the form of chalk drawings on the sidewalks. The new year has not been as kind to these online textbook stores as previous years have been. With the bull market of 1999 turning into a frustrating bear market for the upcoming 2001, many online entities have been dying in droves. Dot-com companies like eToys. com, Pets.com, and WebMD.com, once making headlines with their extravagant employee perks and preInitial Public offering parties, are now making news as they announce dwindling funds and massive lay-
Stacking and shuttle services ease impact of crowded nPARKING: Students complain available parking spaces are too far from campus By Amy Rottier
Daily Titan Staff Writer
CHRIS TENNYSON/Daily Titan
Congested parking lots are an ongoing problem on campus.
It is no secret that students view parking as a problem. As a commuter school, Cal State Fullerton has about 9,001 parking spaces to offer and over 28,000 students. The Parking and Transportation
Services Department is working diligently to stretch its limited funds to satisfy the needs and demands of the students. The new program “Titan Park ‘N Go,” also known as stacked parking, provides room for about 500 extra cars Monday through Thursday. The system is being used in Lots A and B from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. Stacking survived a six-week trial period last semester. Although it is expensive at about $10,000 per week, the overall student reaction is very positive, said Paulette Blumberg, associate director of Parking and Transportation Services. The program was initially implemented to help ease the extra stress
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of parking at the beginning of the fall semester. The stack program will continue through the entire spring semester to help soften the blow of the upcoming loss of 500 parking spaces to plans for new housing. “With the loss of spaces, something has to be done until the parking structure is built,” Blumberg said. “We will have to continue to use a mixture of things, including the stacked parking.” According to Mieka Bledsoe of Parking and Transportation Services, Lots A and G don’t fill up. These lots are known as remote lots because they are farther away
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offs. Online textbook stores and their retail book counterparts have not been excluded from the reality of economics. Professor Barry Pasternack, Department Chair for Management Science and Information Sciences, was not surprised at the near-demise of many online textbook stores. “It’s a difficult business to crack,” Pasternack said. “Books need to be in stock, returning is a hassle, and all just to save a few bucks with an online retailer.” Pasternack, who consulted VarsityBooks.com when they started out, noted that although books are a practical product for an e-commerce model, textbooks were a more difficult product to sell at a profit. “There is only a short window to sell textbooks,” Pasternack said, referring to the first few weeks of a semester or quarter. During the time that online textbook stores flourished, Director of Titan Shops Jerry Olson never felt that sales might be threatened. “Year after year, book sales have increased,” Olson said. Offering many of the same perks that online textbook sites boasted of, like free shipping, low prices and a rebate program, Titan Shops also had the valuable trait of being a “brick-and-mortar” store – how physical businesses are referred to on the Internet – that allowed customers to immediately return a book and receive a refund if they weren’t satisfied. “There is always a certain amount of profitability in textbooks,” Olson said. Referring to why so many sites failed after trying to break into the textbook market, Olson speculated that “the pricing structure of many of these companies did not allow for costs.” Dot-com textbook retailers offered bonuses of 20-50 percent off prices, automatic registration to various types of sweepstakes, and
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