The inevitability of my favorite bookstore closing doesn’t make it any less brutal to watch.
Data points:
- Where I bought my Rough Guide to SF on my first trip here in 1997
- Where I bought dozens of issues of Harpers and The Atlantic
- Where we bought the first books that Ellie helped pick out for herself
- My 2nd-favorite downtown public restroom
- A store whose rent, an employee informed me last month, was $65,000 per month. Every month. Sixty-five thousand dollars.
It’s super-hard to watch good businesses with good people go down; but it truly is just the beginning of a lot of change.
As much as I adored this store, I can’t imagine the insanity of a $65k monthly nut. Especially when you’re competing with free delivery from a company that stocks every conceivable piece of media in print — let alone groceries, toys, electronics, and pretty much any other hard good on the planet that can fit into a box.
Sad, awful, and horribly overdue inevitability that, in this instance, feels like a lot more than a statistic and a shrug.
