Here is a stupid story that is dumb: Borderland Books, a sci-fi and mystery bookstore in San Francisco's Mission District, is closing its Tardis portal (do they have portals? unclear) in March because of San Francisco's terrible horrible (but well-intentioned!) law mandating a $15 minimum wage ... in 2018. We're not science fiction bookstore owners, but we can try to do that math, and according to us, 2018 is three years from now. And yet this dumb and terrible (but well-intentioned!) minimum wage increase is claiming its first indy bookstore scalp now. Huh! That is so weird!
This reminds me of the Menards DIY chain in the St. Louis area, they were set to build on site which required the purchase of some houses under eminent domain. Once the city agreed to this Menards withdrew their application, citing the costs of Obamacare. They have since commenced building on a different site, I&#039;m not sure what <strike>bribery</strike> public financing was involved.
Not to be buzzkill but if you are 62 now your full retirement age probably isn&#039;t 65. Run the numbers. Retire &quot;early&quot; and your earnings can eat into your Social Security income. Basically you make a bet - how long will I live? If you plan on sticking around you might want to wait for SS until you can collect your full benefit (and earnings won&#039;t decrease it!).
All financial advice 100% guaranteed to be worth what you paid for it!
That&#039;s bad math, anyway. Firstly, 15 is just over 36% more than 11.05. Secondly, if operating overhead is half of total cost, he either needs to renegotiate a lease, reduce his consumption of electricity, broadband, and so forth, or pay his employees more.
And third, since everyone in the city making minimum wage (granted, hardly anyone in the City makes minimum wage or they&#039;d all starve) will have 35% more money, a 20% increase in sales isn&#039;t at all out of the question.
Too bad he doesn&#039;t have three years to figure out the numbers, like it took me.
I think he&#039;s using the pre-2015 number of $10.74 for the denominator of the 39%. But it does look like his underlying problem is the $60K or 70K in non-wage overhead.
Basically, they&#039;re running on a shoestring already. Bookstores are a tough business in expensive locations.
I know -- I&#039;m having trouble understanding what Editrix is saying here. Let me see if I have this right...
1. An increase in the minimum wage helps workers whose compensation per hour is at the bottom of the wage scale. (Very true; I know all about this.) 2. San Francisco is an expensive city to live in. Low wage workers in many small businesses there (businesses whose presence help to make the city such a charming and pleasant place to live) need the statutory wage help just to hang on. 3. Nobody who is connected to these small businesses is getting rich. For most, their business is a labor of love, not a path to Easy Street. 4. The previous point is due to the fact that such businesses offer products or services that have very slim profit margins. They really cannot do anything about that because they all face very stiff competition from big chains, mega retailers and online vendors who have much lower operating costs. 5. Raising the minimum wage is good in principle for people like their employees, but is bad for their employers because it raises operating costs in businesses that are unable to adjust their profit margins to accommodate them. There is a hard cap on what these businesses can charge for their products or services, one that is imposed by their larger low cost competitors. They cannot exceed that price cap without losing the few customers they still have to the big boys. 6. The city&#039;s residents hate, hate, hate the Walmarts and Amazons, yet that is where they spend their money. On the other hand, they love love love the little guys, because remember these small businesses contribute a great deal toward making the SF such a livable city. But they don&#039;t support them with their business. Everyone wants very much to keep them around, but they don&#039;t provide enough business to keep them afloat.
It&#039;s a clusterfuck that has been ongoing anyway, raise or no raise. Upping the minimum wage, which we can all agree is <b>a good thing</b>, has the unfortunate side effect of making it even more difficult to keep these businesses around.
Ultimately what would resolve this conundrum is the presence of prosperous middle class and working class communities that would provide the bulk of the small businesses&#039; customers. Such communities did exist at one time, but that was before the richest segment of the population sucked all of the wealth out of them. Now that they have been bled dry of most of their modest wealth and disposable income they cannot afford to support the small businesses whose presence would be keeping their neighborhoods and cities intact as they had always done in the past.
So it isn&#039;t actually the minimum wage raise that is hurting these small businesses. It is the dearth in the wider community of employment that pays anything better than minimum wage. Businesses like Borderlands Books can only survive (and earn enough to pay their employees a living wage like they should) if they are located in communities or neighborhoods where the residents enjoy some degree of income security and some modicum of wealth. (&quot;Wealth&quot; here doesn&#039;t mean &quot;riches&quot;; it means &quot;assets.&quot; Like, say, a positive balance in one&#039;s bank account. Or even just the security of getting a regular paycheck from a steady job, one that will still be there a month from now.) Communities in which the great majority of the working population earns more than minimum wage. The reason that they are struggling now (and failing) is because the communities that supported them have been drained of most or all of their wealth over the past three plus decades.
In order to survive independent brick and mortar bookstores (and other small businesses of a similar nature) need a solid base of customers who don&#039;t mind paying 3-4% more for their merchandise or services than they would pay at Amazon or Walmart for them. In other words, customers who don&#039;t have to watch every penny and aren&#039;t living paycheck to paycheck. What is killing them is the concentration of wealth in this country and the concomitant bleaching of that wealth from the communities that would normally be supporting these businesses. The businesses that are hanging on are doing so with the support of much narrower customer bases than they or their predecessors typically had in the past.
I&#039;m not sure if any houses were torn down, but I understand that a number of residents moved out, which likely made the area more &#039;blighted&#039; than it was before.
Yeah, his real problem isn&#039;t a wage hike. It&#039;s he can&#039;t afford to maintain his business, even if revenues go up 30%, and there&#039;s not much in a managerial sense to be done about that.
Bookstore? Books? Please explain in 140 characters or <strike>fewer</strike> less.
Wah wah. I write comments for wonket and get paid in upfists.
Print is dead?
This reminds me of the Menards DIY chain in the St. Louis area, they were set to build on site which required the purchase of some houses under eminent domain. Once the city agreed to this Menards withdrew their application, citing the costs of Obamacare. They have since commenced building on a different site, I&#039;m not sure what <strike>bribery</strike> public financing was involved.
chicken thief:
Not to be buzzkill but if you are 62 now your full retirement age probably isn&#039;t 65. Run the numbers. Retire &quot;early&quot; and your earnings can eat into your Social Security income. Basically you make a bet - how long will I live? If you plan on sticking around you might want to wait for SS until you can collect your full benefit (and earnings won&#039;t decrease it!).
All financial advice 100% guaranteed to be worth what you paid for it!
Did they already tear down the houses?
This is like the Keystone Pipeline - use eminent domain for a private project.
That&#039;s bad math, anyway. Firstly, 15 is just over 36% more than 11.05. Secondly, if operating overhead is half of total cost, he either needs to renegotiate a lease, reduce his consumption of electricity, broadband, and so forth, or pay his employees more.
And third, since everyone in the city making minimum wage (granted, hardly anyone in the City makes minimum wage or they&#039;d all starve) will have 35% more money, a 20% increase in sales isn&#039;t at all out of the question.
Too bad he doesn&#039;t have three years to figure out the numbers, like it took me.
I&#039;ll just download the article to my Kindle.
Possibly his non-wage expenses will be less than the $60 or 70K he&#039;s apparently running now.
I think he&#039;s using the pre-2015 number of $10.74 for the denominator of the 39%. But it does look like his underlying problem is the $60K or 70K in non-wage overhead.
Basically, they&#039;re running on a shoestring already. Bookstores are a tough business in expensive locations.
I know -- I&#039;m having trouble understanding what Editrix is saying here. Let me see if I have this right...
1. An increase in the minimum wage helps workers whose compensation per hour is at the bottom of the wage scale. (Very true; I know all about this.) 2. San Francisco is an expensive city to live in. Low wage workers in many small businesses there (businesses whose presence help to make the city such a charming and pleasant place to live) need the statutory wage help just to hang on. 3. Nobody who is connected to these small businesses is getting rich. For most, their business is a labor of love, not a path to Easy Street. 4. The previous point is due to the fact that such businesses offer products or services that have very slim profit margins. They really cannot do anything about that because they all face very stiff competition from big chains, mega retailers and online vendors who have much lower operating costs. 5. Raising the minimum wage is good in principle for people like their employees, but is bad for their employers because it raises operating costs in businesses that are unable to adjust their profit margins to accommodate them. There is a hard cap on what these businesses can charge for their products or services, one that is imposed by their larger low cost competitors. They cannot exceed that price cap without losing the few customers they still have to the big boys. 6. The city&#039;s residents hate, hate, hate the Walmarts and Amazons, yet that is where they spend their money. On the other hand, they love love love the little guys, because remember these small businesses contribute a great deal toward making the SF such a livable city. But they don&#039;t support them with their business. Everyone wants very much to keep them around, but they don&#039;t provide enough business to keep them afloat.
It&#039;s a clusterfuck that has been ongoing anyway, raise or no raise. Upping the minimum wage, which we can all agree is <b>a good thing</b>, has the unfortunate side effect of making it even more difficult to keep these businesses around.
Ultimately what would resolve this conundrum is the presence of prosperous middle class and working class communities that would provide the bulk of the small businesses&#039; customers. Such communities did exist at one time, but that was before the richest segment of the population sucked all of the wealth out of them. Now that they have been bled dry of most of their modest wealth and disposable income they cannot afford to support the small businesses whose presence would be keeping their neighborhoods and cities intact as they had always done in the past.
So it isn&#039;t actually the minimum wage raise that is hurting these small businesses. It is the dearth in the wider community of employment that pays anything better than minimum wage. Businesses like Borderlands Books can only survive (and earn enough to pay their employees a living wage like they should) if they are located in communities or neighborhoods where the residents enjoy some degree of income security and some modicum of wealth. (&quot;Wealth&quot; here doesn&#039;t mean &quot;riches&quot;; it means &quot;assets.&quot; Like, say, a positive balance in one&#039;s bank account. Or even just the security of getting a regular paycheck from a steady job, one that will still be there a month from now.) Communities in which the great majority of the working population earns more than minimum wage. The reason that they are struggling now (and failing) is because the communities that supported them have been drained of most or all of their wealth over the past three plus decades.
In order to survive independent brick and mortar bookstores (and other small businesses of a similar nature) need a solid base of customers who don&#039;t mind paying 3-4% more for their merchandise or services than they would pay at Amazon or Walmart for them. In other words, customers who don&#039;t have to watch every penny and aren&#039;t living paycheck to paycheck. What is killing them is the concentration of wealth in this country and the concomitant bleaching of that wealth from the communities that would normally be supporting these businesses. The businesses that are hanging on are doing so with the support of much narrower customer bases than they or their predecessors typically had in the past.
I&#039;m not sure if any houses were torn down, but I understand that a number of residents moved out, which likely made the area more &#039;blighted&#039; than it was before.
Yeah, his real problem isn&#039;t a wage hike. It&#039;s he can&#039;t afford to maintain his business, even if revenues go up 30%, and there&#039;s not much in a managerial sense to be done about that.
And further reduces the value of the remaining homes.
Is this a great country or what?
Biff - The issue isn&#039;t IF you can collect - the issue is how much?