Re:Borderlands Books is Closing
by shadowflit on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @06:20PM
(#8994248)
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.
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.