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BORDERLANDS_FADES

                                             February 6, 2015

                                             Originally published
                                             at the dailykos.com

One more bookstore on San Francisco's Valencia Street (the second
to last) is about to close, Borderlands Books, a                          http://www.borderlands-books.com/
Science Fiction bookstore with an attached cafe.  The usual story
in San Francisco is that a landlord got greedy and tried to triple
the rent (commercial rent control?  What are you, some kind of
commie?), but the cause in this case turns out to be very unusual:
there's a new local minimum wage, and the bookstore can't see how
to pay it and get the finances to work.

Our conservative friends are already out there on the comment
boards ranting about how this is the fault of that damn liberal
government interference, but the management of the bookstore
has a deeper understanding than that:


    "Many businesses can make adjustments to allow for increased
     wages The cafe side of Borderlands, for example,    
     should have no difficulty at all.Viability is simply
     a matter of increasing prices. And, since all the     
     other cafes in the city will be under the same pressure,
     all the prices will float upwards.  But books are a  
     special case because the price is set by the publisher and
     printed on the book. Furthermore, for years part of
     the challenge for brick-and-mortar bookstores is that
     companies like Amazon.com have made it difficult to get
     people to pay retail prices."


And Amazon, as you should know by now, isn't actually all that
profitable a business: there's a hot debate about whether they're
engaged in predatory pricing or just really, really efficient.
My take is if they're not selling below cost to maintain
marketshare, it's only because they're also using their muscle to
keep their costs down: they pressure publishers to sell to them
cheap, and keep their labor and operating costs down with some
famously bad working conditions and worker treatment (a kind of
"efficiency", I suppose).

The closing of Borderlands books might indicate a flaw in the         http://borderlands-books.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-personal-note.html
minimum wage law (one can imagine an exception for small, locally
owned businesses, for example), but it also could be taken as a
need for some "trust-busting" directed at companies like Amazon,
who's anti-competitive behavior is distorting the market so
badly.

And in the meantime, while we're waiting for that and a flight of
winged ponies to appear, we might think about boycotting Amazon.


          How this actually played out:

          Borderlands Books has so many well-wishers,
          that the people running the bookstore were
          compelled to develop a supporting membership
          program, and that's keeping the doors open.

          This is another bookstore turning from
          business to a non-profit model...                "Modern Times"
                                                           in SF did something
          Myself, I keep predicting a                      similar, as I
          resurgence of the idea of social                 understand it.
          clubs.  In the internet commerce
          era, the old business models for           (There was a period when
          maintaining brick and mortar are           all the good bookstores
          failing, and yet people really do          in SF-- with a few
          need their Third Place.                    exceptions-- were named
                                                     after Chaplin flicks:
                                                     "City Lights", "Modern
                                                     Times", "Limelight"...)




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