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.
Well, there's your first problem right there.
Liberals being liberals. Duh!
Holding on to an anchor of socialism while insisting capitalism is bad but trying to make a living in the free market. Bipolar thinking.
...He notes with pride that his store has turned a profit each year — no small task — since its very first year [1989]. 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.
How he managed to make a profit every year, and still think this "small amount of money" would be a business cost that was "something he could absorb" escapes me. Welcome to the cost of theft-by-ballot-box.
Shoulda checked with Kipling first
“The Gods of the Copybook Headings”
Rudyard Kipling
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn.
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Heading said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had
plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Heading said: “If you don’t work you die.”
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not God that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four-
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man- There are only
four things certain since Social Progress began:-
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Unlike government, if businesses don't make money, they don't exist. The law of unintended consequences (which affects liberals far more than conservatives) strikes again.
You have been in business for 26 years? You should have been able to calculate this in less than a minute.
He evidently makes a profit solely by accident.
Rush is correct that the majority of Americans have absolutely ZERO understanding of economics...period. Liberals in particular cannot understand the most basic principle of cause and effect as it applies to businesses. The majority of them have a deranged idea that businesses have this huge stash of money that they refuse to pay their employees and it’s the liberals job to steal it away from the owners and redistribute it to liberal constituents. Reality sets in when the jaws of the Economics unintended consequences trap slam shut. Oops.
You most likely voted for the minimum wage and now you cooked your goose you stupid asses.
Minimum wage in San Francisco? Raise it to a hundred dollars an hour.
Why kill off businesses slowly? If progressives want to destroy the business community, do it quickly... hundred bucks an hour.
I would also add;
Liberals view “Profits” as evil.
But somehow they don’t see their own personal savings the same way. A persons savings is essentially the same as a profit.
Stupid is as stupid does.
“My jaw dropped. Eighty-thousand a year! I didn’t know that.”
Math is hard.
Meanwhile in another cultural reality on the Big Bang Theory Stewart the former comic book store owner continues to leech of the Wolowitz family. :)
BUMP! When I was in business we did a detailed payroll projection for next month, next quarter and for the year.
Putting this into a spread sheet made it fairly simple to play “what if” games. What if I give Joe a 10% raise? How much additional revenue will it take to bring on four more people? We have new contracts that total 105K/year. How many more people can we hire on that? Etc.
Based on what we see in this article, if Mr. Hibbs has made a profit every year since 1989, it has been by accident. He is indeed lucky.
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