The ISU Surplus Store’s rules on sales to the general public are a joke. ISU students are only allowed to purchase surplus during sales to the general public.

Now, if you show up before it opens, there will be about a hundred old men wrapped around the building, waiting to snatch up every discounted item they can manage. They fill their pickups and trailers to the brim with their pillage, satisfied with another haul to sell on their eBay.

They wrest away everything of value in less than fifteen minutes while most students are in class or unable to make it on site, in part due to the Surplus Store being just shy of a half-hour walk from the nearest CyRide stop.

Students should be able to buy unneeded and discounted equipment for the university, which they will directly use, instead of crusty old boomers trying to make a profit from equipment purchased with tuition and grants.

Unsurprisingly, ISU Surplus has had no interest in extending their hours or making any sorts of changes to allow students to buy surplus at the end of intramural sales on Tuesdays.

When asked to take action last year, Student Government responded in their typical fashion: fervent agreement that this is an issue, promising to take action and proceeding to be as useful as a distasteful lollipop towards producing any sort of meaningful change on campus.

ISU students deserve to have preference in acquiring excess property prior to the general public profiting from it.

Whether to furnish an apartment, find an affordable laptop for coursework or locate discounted equipment to support entrepreneurship, students should have this resource available to them.

The current system is woefully inadequate and a tremendous disservice.