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The closing of College Supply Bookstore in mid-November, after 75 years of selling textbooks and school supplies to LSU students, closes out yet another chapter of Baton Rouge history.

Owner Chris Willis, whose parents acquired College Supply and Highland Road Bookstore in the early 1960s, decided it was time to close shop after sales increasingly suffered. He says business peaked five or six years ago before entering a steady decline, which steepened the last couple of years.

“Our sales had dropped off significantly over the last two or three years,” Willis says. “This was just the time to get out. We had started over the last year having to put some of our own money into the business to keep it going.”

Willis blames a combination of factors, including the Internet, where students across the United States can buy used textbooks from each other at prices Willis can’t hope to match. The trend of textbook warehouses selling directly to students rather than through retail stores hasn’t helped. Then there’s the wholesale price of the textbooks themselves, which he says has gotten completely out of hand.

“Even used books are expensive,” Willis says. “A freshman calculus book—used—will run you about $135.”

Highland Road Bookstore, before it closed in 1981, sold law books and Greek gear—jewelry, T-shirts, etc. But College Supply has always been strictly textbooks. And supplies. For decades, it was enough.

“Most of the other stores around sell LSU things,” Willis says. “If you’ve got the space for it, that’s great. Some of the big stores like Co-op and LSU, they’ve got tons of space and they can handle all that stuff. There’s a big profit margin there, selling that stuff.”

College Supply, on State Street next to Louie’s Café, never went the soft goods route, primarily because of a lack of space. Maybe it would’ve helped. We’ll never know. Willis notes that enrollment at LSU had dropped from a peak of around 35,000 to a little over 28,000, leaving five bookstores competing for a dwindling number of customers. Somebody was bound to be voted off the island.

Willis wasn’t the only merchant feeling the online squeeze. Nick Richard, owner and general manager of Chimes Textbook Exchange (CTX), says online retailers have taken a toll on his business as well.

“It’s gotten harder,” he says. “Barnes & Noble and Amazon, they are definitely hurting us.”

The store is fighting back by establishing its own online presence—even selling textbooks through Amazon’s third-party online marketplace.

Richard also has increased his buy-back prices to encourage students to sell their used textbooks to him rather than online. Today’s students tend to assume they’ll get a better deal online whether they actually do or not. Richard says that despite the heavy competition, CTX, with a store on Burbank Drive in addition to its Chimes Street location, should be able to hold its own.

“We have every intention of being here for a while,” he says. “We’re OK living with 15% of the market. It’s still enough to keep us in business.”

Willis says it was a tough decision pulling the plug considering the bonds his family had forged with LSU over the decades.

“I really didn’t want to do it,” he says. “I really had a lot of friends on campus—teachers who dealt exclusively through me and not even through the other bookstores. They were really disappointed about me going out of business.”

Many of those friends were in the sociology department. In the early days, Willis’ father, Ross, who is now deceased, took a couple of sociology professors fishing. That evolved into such a relationship that by the mid-1990s, College Supply had all the department’s business. Willis even started an annual scholarship—the College Supply Bookstore Scholarship Award—to assist top sociology undergrads with school expenses. It’s accompanied each year by a crawfish boil at the house of Willis’ mother.

“We wanted to give back something to that department in particular because they had supported us,” he says. “We continued to do that all the way up through last year, and we may even have it again this year.”

Mike Grimes, a sociology professor at LSU since 1973, says College Supply will be sorely missed by the department. He remembers being introduced to the elder Willis nearly the day he arrived to teach at LSU. Grimes also remembers “incredibly good service,” and says the disappearance of College Supply is simply more evidence of how the U.S. economy has changed in terms of mom-and-pop stores being snuffed out by major retailers, from A&P to McDonald’s.

“It’s simply the dynamic nature of the economy,” Grimes says. “It made them kind of irrelevant.”

He thinks society pays a hidden price, nevertheless. Mom-and-pop stores, whether they sell groceries, burgers or books, are—or were—important members of the social community, not just the economic community, Grimes says. He cites the College Supply scholarship as a prime example. At the other end of the spectrum, Wal-Mart has a poor track record of giving back to the community, though the retail giant is “getting smarter about it,” he says.

“I guess I’m an old fuddy-duddy,” Grimes says. “I really do think it’s a pity. But again, this is capitalism. It works that way. It’s unfortunate that it has victims.”