http://borderlands-books.blogspot.com/2015/02/borderlands-books-to-close-in-march.html Aw, lame. Borderlands is a swell store.

What gets me the most is they're planning to shut down as a result of the new $15 minimum wage law, but they would otherwise be a going concern -- I, too, am super concerned about this law, as it radically scales up our cost of doing business is a way that really does little for us. Like Borderlands, we sell products with a SRP printed right on the cover and we can't "raise prices" in any significant way to cover increased expenses. Going from $10.74/hr in 2013 to $15/hr in 2018 is a massive increase in a very short time!

The thing is, a higher minimum wage is unlikely to sell any more comics (comics are kind of a luxury item, really!), and I'm not even sure that it's going to help the people it is intended to help anyway -- certainly neither of my managers live in the City any longer because they can't afford rents here, but they're STILL not going to be able to afford it with the new rates. They're competing with Tech Boomers, who all get paid far more, and there aren't good City policies in place to build more affordable housing stock. And so the price of McDonalds will just go up, which is likely to hurt the person earning minimum wage more anyway.

I've used to be proud for years that we paid more than MW (and for my Managers, we still do), but thanks to the voters of San Francisco, that state of affairs is pretty likely to end before 2018, and that sucks.

San Francisco went chain bookstore-free a few years back, so it's even worse to see surviving indies get pushed out

-B