One more bookstore on San Francisco's Valencia Street (the second to last) is about to close, Borderlands Books, a 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...
Currently the front page of the Borderlands site points out:
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 market share, 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 new 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.