Borderlands Books To Stay Open

Borderlands Books reached its goal of 300 sponsors by Saturday afternoon. The San Francisco bookseller has announced it will stay open until at least March 31, 2016.

The critical mass of sponsors needed to underwrite the store’s survival plan came forward in less than two days. The first 60 signed up within two hours after the plan was announced —

One of them was calling from New Zealand.  Another had been married at the store.  At one point last night, Borderlands was one of the top five trending topics on Twitter.

Staff member Jude Feldman wrote, “I knew that people liked the store and even loved it. But I never, in my wildest dreams, would have imagined that so many people liked it so much.”

5 thoughts on “Borderlands Books To Stay Open

  1. Happy to see Borderlands is staying open, but this is a bad message to send to San Francisco’s politicians and businesses. “Don’t worry about passing odious laws… someone else will pay the bill when it all starts to fall apart.”

  2. I’m glad Borderlands will remain open but AV’s reply also points out why I may not shop there again. San Francisco is VERY expensive. I moved 50 miles north in part due to the cost of housing there. $15 an hour is not an odious minimum wage, it’s a minimum wage. It’s being phased in over several years. The $2 an hour I earned at a pizza place when I was in high school back in 1972 is, adjusted for inflation, more than Borderlands is paying its employees today. They face existential competition from Amazon and e-books. The store is in THE hottest neighborhood in SF (they may have a good long-term lease, though). Yet the owners chose to bitch about minimum wage as their ruination. I understand their difficulty with price adjustment but there are other forces besides government mandates at work here. As long as they get real community support, and not just lip setvice (like the lip service to affordable housing the SF supervisors have been mouthing for 40 years) then they will get by. Which is good, I guess. Conflicted, here.

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