Earlier this month, Borderland’s Books announced its plans to close. At the time, I wrote that the sci-fi and fantasy store had “a hobbit’s chance in Mordor” of surviving. Three weeks later, it seems my facile metaphor was well chosen, as hope has returned to Borderlands, a plan has been enacted, and a fellowship of resistance has been joined. A newsletter circulated by the store’s owner on Thursday resulted in an outpouring of support that by Saturday afternoon had ensured the Mission District bookseller will remain in business for at least another year.
On Friday, Borderlands began selling $100 yearly memberships. The newsletter (which was also published on the store’s blog) announced that if the store sold 300 of these memberships, it would stay open for until at least March 31, 2016. It took a little over 24 hours to reach that goal.
In the time since he originally announced his plans to close shop, Borderland’s co-owner Alan Beatts has been on a whirlwind press junket to rival that of many a political candidate. The Borderlands saga was seized upon by ideologues and reporters of every shade of the spectrum, from the New Yorkerand MSNBC’s Morning Joe to Breitbart and Glenn Beck. A thread on Hacker News was started and quickly proliferated into a rigorous debate around the fundamentals of classical economics theory, with Borderlands as case study. Comments sections seethed and roiled.
But then something interesting happened. On February 12th, Borderlands held a public meeting at its adjacent cafe. Every available square foot of space was filled with chairs, and by the time Beatts took his place on a raised platform at the back of the room, nearly every seat was occupied and an overflow crowd was leaning on walls, sitting on the floor and squeezing into the periphery.
Beatts was noticeably apprehensive as he opened the meeting, laying out ground rules for the conversation and taking pains to clarify his positions on the store’s prospects, the minimum wage law that threatened to do it in, and the timbre of the response to his initial announcement. In retrospect, he needn’t have been as anxious. When the floor was opened to audience input, it became clear this crowd hadn’t gathered to debate the soundness of his decisions, and that there was little threat of the meeting descending into the clamor of invective and vitriol which characterized much of the online version of the discussion.
Instead, the comments from the assembled were uniformly civil. There were earnest questions, creative suggestions, and pledges of support.
The quality of those suggestion and the size and tenor of the turnout prompted Beatts to reconsider his resolute stance. When on he first gave notice of Borderlands’ impending closure, Beatts proposed the upcoming meeting more as a gesture of goodwill to his customers than a referendum on the bookstore’s future.
“Although we do not believe that any viable alternative exists, we also think that we have a very smart and imaginative group of customers. It is not impossible that we've missed a potential solution, and so we want an opportunity to hear your thoughts,” he wrote.
That the meeting exceeded the management’s expectations is understatement. After mulling it over for a week and getting a plan together, Beatts issued a follow-up newsletter and blog post detailing the new situation.
When I stopped the shop on Friday, Beatts and staff were already flooded with phone calls and emails and were taking down credit card information as fast as they could manage. For Borderlands, the revolution will not be on Kickstarter. True to the spirit of direct engagement that sparked the new plan, the store is handling the sponsorships on its own, accepting memberships over the phone, through the mail, and over the counter.
When I was able to catch Beatts during a pause in the action, he estimated that, in roughly an hour since opening shop that morning, Borderlands had sold nearly 100 memberships.
“I just never imagined this place meant so much to so many people,” he said, choking back tears.
The membership scheme will allow Borderlands to cover the increases in labor costs brought by the minimum wage increase. It could do a lot more besides.
For Beatts, this new development promises to change the way he runs his business. Coordinating with a network of dedicated sponsors will allow Borderlands to develop events and other offerings with direct input from customers.
For the community (that is, a pool of people living in close proximity, rather than the abstracted ‘communities’ of the internet), the reversal of Borderlands’ fates could mark the beginnings of a broader movement. The idea that loyal supporters can successfully join together to find solutions to common problems is pretty inspiring. It’s a realization that could have a powerful effect in today’s San Francisco, at a time when powerful market forces seem insurmountable and the will of residents ineffectual.
“Thank you so much for letting me keep doing what I love best in the world; thank you for doing your part to help keep San Francisco weird; and thank you for helping to preserve space for the dreamers. I have never before thought that loving something as hard as you could was enough to change anything — that sounds like something that only happens in stories — in fantasy. But you proved me wrong,” writes General Manager Jude Feldman in a newsletter circulated on Sunday, announcing that the 300 member goal has been reached.
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Photo by Ian Irving/Flickr