This has nothing to do with minimum wage, and everything to do with running an unsuccessful business in the first place.

If you're clearing $3k in profit a year you have a very expensive hobby, not a viable business.

We can all be sad that a bookshop is closing, but the real culprit was a lack of sales and marketing savvy, and a lack of customer interest in the product/experience being offered.

Minimum wage may have thrown a few rocks onto the coffin, but it certainly didn't dig the grave.

There a lot of new booksellers making a living on Amazon. Some of them trade internationally. (I buy a steady stream of specialist titles from US sellers.)

If I wanted to buy from Borderlands, not only would I be paying far too much for every book in their list, I'd also be charged $25 for shipping.

Somehow everyone else in the world can ship me a book for less than half that. But Borderlands hasn't figured out how to.

That's where the fail is. Not in hand-wringing about having to pay staff an amount that still isn't close to a fair wage.

Also, while this store sounds like a great place and one that I would visit... this article is the first time I have seen the name. I live in SF, I could have been going here, and yet I did not know it existed (and close enough that I could have combined it with Tartine visits to boot). Sure, it's partially my failure, but it's also a marketing failure.

>If you're clearing $3k in profit a year you have a very expensive hobby, not a viable business.

Depends on whether you pay yourself before the profit or not.

They were nice enough to provide some numbers, so I tried to figure out what's going on with Borderlands.

First thing, they say that a move from $10.74 to $15.00/hr will cost them $28,000 (from +$3k to -$25k), which implies they're paying over 6,000 hours worth of hourly labor.

Another option to make up that $28k would be to increase sales by 20%, which means their current annual gross margin is somewhere around $150k.

"[R]ent, payroll, and credit card processing represent 68% of all [their] expenses" and since they're basically breakeven let's say that merchandise costs are 30% with 2% miscellaneous costs (utility bills, etc).

So their gross margin is probably something around 65% as CC fees should never be more than 5% and merch is around 30%.

With $150k of gross margin at 65%, it looks like this store, employing 3 FTEs worth of part-time labor, is grossing about $225,000 per year.

If the average book in that store costs $15 (they say they're limited on what they can charge based on the sticker price, so this may even be low) they're staffing 3 people in the store at all times, all year round, to sell 42 books per day.

I think I found why you're having to pay yourselves out of the cafe money, sirs.

Viable, then.