Posted on 05/01/2015 6:47:58 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
‘I’m hearing from a lot of customers, ‘I voted for that, and I didn’t realize it would affect you.’”
So says Brian Hibbs, owner and operator of Comix Experience, an iconic comic-book and graphic-novel shop on San Francisco’s Divisadero Street, of the city’s new minimum-wage law.
San Francisco’s Proposition J, which 77 percent of voters approved in November, will raise the minimum wage in the city to $15 by 2018. As of today, May 1, Hibbs is required by law to pay his employees at Comix Experience, and its sister store, Comix Experience Outpost on Ocean Avenue, $12.25 per hour. That’s just the first of four incremental raises that threaten to put hundreds of such shops out of business.
Hibbs opened Comix Experience on April Fools’ Day, 1989, when he was just 21 years old. Over two-and-a-half decades, the store has become a must-visit location for premier comic-book artists and graphic novelists, and Hibbs has become a leading figure in the industry, serving as a judge for the prestigious Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards and as a member of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s board of directors. He notes with pride that his store has turned a profit each year — no small task — since its very first year.
But that may not last. Hibbs says that the $15-an-hour minimum wage will require a staggering $80,000 in extra revenue annually. “I was appalled!” he says. “My jaw dropped. Eighty-thousand a year! I didn’t know that. I thought we were talking a small amount of money, something I could absorb.”
He runs a tight operation already, he says. Comix Experience is open ten hours a day, seven days a week, with usually just one employee at each store at a time. It’s not viable to cut hours, he says, because his slowest hours are in the middle of the day. And he can’t raise prices, because comic books and graphic novels have their retail prices printed on the cover.
What is a small-businessman to do?
Hibbs is not the first person to encounter this problem. On February 1, San Francisco’s renowned science-fiction bookstore Borderlands Books published the following on its website:
Although all of us at Borderlands support the concept of a living wage in princip[le] and we believe that it’s possible that the new law will be good for San Francisco — Borderlands Books as it exists is not a financially viable business if subject to that minimum wage. Consequently we will be closing our doors no later than March 31st.
Its plight eventually drew the attention of The New Yorker, and a crowdfunding campaign thought up by concerned customers found some 300 sponsors, all of whom agreed to pay $100 to help keep the store afloat until at least March 31, 2016.
Hibbs has considered doing the same but notes two problems: “By saying, ‘Give me money,’ you’re sort of saying you’re not viable.” Furthermore, “There’s a limitation on how much crowdfunding can be done. When you’re the tenth one, I don’t know if it’s going to be easy for you.”
“Despite being a progressive living in San Francisco, I do believe in capitalism. I’d like to have the market solve this problem.” Hibbs is not inclined to circumvent the market: “Despite being a progressive living in San Francisco, I do believe in capitalism. I’d like to have the market solve this problem.” That applies not just to his plight, but to the question of the minimum wage: “We’re for a living wage, for a minimum wage, in principle. . . . But I think any law that doesn’t look at whether people can pay may not be the best way to go.”
“Why,” he asks, “can’t two consenting people make arrangements for less than x dollars per hour?”
And the problem goes still deeper. While forcing hundreds of Bay Area small businesses to close, cut staff, or overhaul their practices, San Francisco lawmakers have given multimillion-dollar tax breaks to lure or keep technology giants such as Twitter and Zoosk. “There’s lots of room for the rich and the powerful,” Hibbs observes, “but, really, they’re not doing anything to help small business.”
It threatens the whole economic ecosystem of San Francisco, Hibbs argues: “We’re the reason businesses like Twitter want to be here — because of arts and culture. Without stores like mine, without stores like Borderlands, this city would be a poorer place. We’re selling art, commodities, people’s dreams. To have fewer places to have those things on sale, I think, diminishes San Francisco.”
So how is Hibbs addressing the squeeze on his own business? He and his staff have launched a curated “Graphic Novel-of-the-Month Club.” Subscribers will receive a new graphic novel each month, handpicked by the staff, as well as an invitation to monthly book-club meetings, visits from and after-hours events with featured writers and artists, and various other goodies. For those not located in the Bay Area, the novels will be shipped and in-store events will be streamed, so that club members nationwide and internationally can participate.
It’s a solution that Hibbs and his staff think reflects their core values: It allows the market to solve the problem, it draws upon the staff’s comic-book and graphic-novel expertise, and it fosters community.
Hibbs and his staff are upfront about the reasons for the club — and they have been encouraged by the response. They say they need 334 subscribers to remain solvent with the new minimum wage, and in the first month they are 40 percent of the way toward that goal. If they get more than their target number of subscribers, Hibbs plans to divvy the extra cash as raises or bonuses.
Hibbs’s employees — students, aspiring artists, and just plain and simple comic-book lovers — know that “the value of their work is respected here,” he says. And he knows that that work should be appropriately compensated. He has been able to do it for a quarter-century by dint of a passion and acumen for his business.
Continuing to do so in spite of San Francisco’s overzealous progressivism does not require superhuman strength, but it might be nigh heroic nonetheless.
— Ian Tuttle is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.
This, with the comment about being a progessive, makes me think this libtard voted this on himself.
“””Well, there’s your first problem right there.””””
Actually, being a progressive and living in San Francisco is two problems.
Yep. Thinking through the consequences of their ideological purity is not just politically incorrect, it's beyond the power of their educationally dumbed-down brains to even attempt.
Sounds like places like San Fracisco and Seattle are about to discover that the real life minimum wage is $0 per hour.
Results matter.
Unintended results also matter.
One measure of intelligence and maturity is the ability to recognize the future consequences of your actions.
Minimum wage changes have consequences.
Burning down your local CVS drug store also has consequences.
The law that is putting them out of business, they still support it, lol.
Plus he evidently isn’t making all that much anyway? How can he afford to live in the SF on a profit of less that $80k per year?
As a good progressive, if he’s making more than that, he s/b PROUD to redistribute his excess profits to his poor employees.
But if he can’t absorb an incremental $80k in costs, he’s not exactly raking it in.
““Despite being a progressive living in San Francisco, I do believe in capitalism. I’d like to have the market solve this problem.”
Spoken like a true hypocrite liberal. They love money but pretend to dont love it as it is “not cool” which opposes the lib doctrine of the “collective good”.
You know the bad part? This idiot will move to a red state amd spread his lib disease there. That’s the problem. Liberals are cockroaches who infect red states.
In San Francisco, the only arrangement two consenting people can make is for anal sex. All other relationships are under governmnent conrol. And you certainly cannot do anything as gross as an economic trade.
Liberalism is a mental illness-— Michael Savage
But I doubt they understand the ramifications of voting for Dems. Like my lib step-daughter and my three lib sisters (two of whom are millionaires from working for an evil, corporation), they think wealth and a healthy economy is just something that happens naturally. They don't understand how it can be destroyed.
$239.53 per year or only $19.96/month.
If allowed to improvise, businesses can flourish. Government cannot allow individuals to succeed. Contrary to the principles this country was founded upon.
Of course, if he had been doing this for the last 20 years, he would be in the catbird seat.
$80,000X 20 years = 1.6 million dollars extra.
I’m a business major and we had the same financial analysis project back at Stanford. The libtard professor unbelievably, was making up numbers to make liberalism sound good. Our group had to simplify an Excel sheet with Powerpoint just to make him look stupid.
A lot of small businesses are surviving on slim margins in the People’s Republic
>> “Despite being a progressive living in San Francisco, I do believe in capitalism.”
Nevermind capitalism. Do you believe in arithmetic? Because arithmetic is what bit you in your fairyland ass.
Money comes from unicorn trees.
$80,000 extra ?
According to the story.
2 stores
1 employee at each
10 hours a day
7 days a week
$15.00 per hour minus $12.25 = $2.75 additional cost per hour
2.75 X 10hrs X 2emp’s X 365 days = $20,075
Maybe Øbama can grant him an exemption on this?
I think that’s true of rank-and-file leftists, but I think that the leftists at the top-Soros and his ilk-know exactly what they’re doing, which is destroying the middle class through measures like this, and redistribution.
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