No alchemy station in buy mode

Okay, I feel like I have to be missing something obvious here...

I have a spell caster sim who I wanted to practice alchemy. I bought her a cauldron but saw she couldn't make potions because she didn't know any formulas. So I looked for books to help her learn the skill, but there were none in the bookcase store. I looked up how to build the skill, and the internet said to read alchemy books (still can't find those) and to buy the alchemy station from buy mode. I was confused, because I didn't see one of those, but went back to the game to purchase one. Thing is, I don't have it in my buy mode. I checked in activities and skills, filtered for the realm of magic pack in case I was missing it, looked it up in the search bar. It's as if it's not part of the game. I've never had or heard of anything like this happening before. Any ideas?