The bookstore continues to overprice their merchandise with a $1,000 armchair

It’s well known that the stuff at the UBC Bookstore is laughably overpriced, but there latest shenanigan could be their strangest one yet. Promoted via Santa J. Ono’s twitter feed, the UBC bookstore is now selling four separate university-branded UBC chairs that cost $1,075.95 dollars each.

Let me repeat that — the bookstore is selling UBC Chairs. For over a thousand dollars.

Just let that sink into your head.

Even Santa Ono is a little flustered by the price:

So is their anything special about these chairs? Well according to the online description of the “Boston Rocker with alumniUBC Logo,” these chairs are “made entirely of solid maple hardwood.” They also feature “a steam bent scrolled-top crown in cherry finish with a laser engraved UBC crest, hand-painted gold beading on the spindles, and a comfortable scooped and saddled seat.”

But to anyone who just sees a chair as something to sit on, these chairs really just look like regular wooden chairs with a UBC logo slapped on them. I can’t even get a good look at the logo from their website because the “view larger image” button just shows a terrible-resolution photo that isn’t very big and just looks like a blur when I try to zoom in.

In contrast, this Nobility Rocking Chair by Novica is, according to our culture editor, Sam DuBois, “$400 less and it's got bloody leather on it.”

These chairs are being promoted as “the perfect gift for alumni or distinguished faculty members,” but it’s a little hard to imagine that recent UBC graduates would find a thousand-dollar UBC-branded chair to be a good gift. After four or more years of sitting in them at university, students don’t see chairs as valuable works of art. They see chairs as furniture with a purely functional use, not something to invest money into or show off prestigious-ness with.

So if you or someone in your life needs a new chair, perhaps it’s best to stick with IKEA.

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