6 ms·
> Since opening, the Scarlett Letters hadn’t made a month-by-month profit, but had been kept afloat by savings and a monthly donation of £10,000 from an anonymo
by tbrownaw 1y ago
> Since opening, the Scarlett Letters hadn’t made a month-by-month profit, but had been kept afloat by savings and a monthly donation of £10,000 from an anonymous “angel investor”.
Sounds like it wasn't so much a business as a piece of performance art.
- nativeit 1y agoThat’s probably true of most book stores at this point.
- alexey-salmin 1y agoNot really, margins on coffee are extremely high and a library-like environment can attract paying customers if you play it right.
- nenenejej 1y agoBeing in hospitality is not high margin. You want people to buy a coffee and breakfast or lunch and go away fairly quickly.
- bombcar 1y agoIndependent bookstores stay afloat if they own their building, usually. At least the ones I know of that have remained open are in a building owned by the owner (so they don't have to pay rent).
- badpun 1y agoA business that is only reasonably profitable if it doesn't have to pay rent is not really profitable. If the owner owns the building, he might as well rent out the place and get majority of income without doing any work. The bookstore is just a hobby on top of rental income, which he chooses to plow into his own bookstore.
- bombcar 1y agoThe dirty secret of small businesses is that a vast number of them are not really profitable, because something is not counted on the books - either rent, or labor, or other things.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- greenie_beans 1y agono. bookstores are low margin endeavor but they still manage to stay in business and have been growing: https://www.uschamber.com/co/good-company/launch-pad/modern-bookstore-revival https://www.uschamber.com/co/good-company/launch-pad/modern-... will be interesting to see what happens with this trend in the current economy
- basisword 1y agoNon-profit's exist. And if we're judging whether or not something is a business based on how much profit it's making that would make Silicon Valley the global centre of performance art.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoOP is more interested in hearing about organizations that take on ambitious investment without apparent return in the fight for unicorn status profits in the future, rather than a fight for something non-financial
- clickety_clack 1y agoThere’s a difference between a non-profit, and not making a profit!
- charcircuit 1y agoNon profits still try to make as much profit as possible. There are just extra legal restrictions on how money can be spent or extracted from the business.
- Daub 1y agoI think that the non-profits you are referring to are likely not-for-profits.
- more_corn 1y agoLot of drama for not much of a business.
- strathmeyer 1y ago[dead]
- SanjayMehta 1y ago[flagged]
- woodpanel 1y agoSomething tells me that a meeting at a Zizians Chapter will virtually be indistinguishable from those described in the article, or the average HN reader‘s Standup at work. Either this or my brain is just too oppressively colonial.
- jasonlotito 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
- SanjayMehta 1y agoNo one follows the guidelines here, when they spot someone telling the truth. Hypocrisy news is more like it.
- jasonlotito 1y agoSo, a tech startup.
- tptacek 1y agoI understand the dynamics of book stores and see how you could carry something like this for a long time with a not-crazy amount of money but what weirds me out are the people involved in the project who get mad at the "angel investors".
- stogot 1y agoDid you notice in the story that their anger started with invoking their own prejudices or victimhood, each and every time? Getting mad at an angel investor and trying to steal an entire bookstore seems normal for this group of people.
- Aurornis 1y agoA museum in my city closed because they were very unprofitable and couldn’t continue attracting more and more donations to handle their costs. A lot of people were angry and upset that it was closing, but whenever you pressed someone about it they would admit they hadn’t visited in a decade or more. Of those who had, the experience wasn’t very good. The museum had become more interested in poor digital displays and other disappointing museum things that simply weren’t interesting to view. It didn’t stop people from being mad that it was closed or even getting angry at donors that pulled their funding. Some people like the idea of something existing in their city even though they don’t want to pay for it with their own money.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mathattack 1y agoAlso true of favorite restaurants and childhood haunts. Things change and interests move on.
- Nursie 1y agoAnd nightclubs. There was one in the small city I went to university in and (later on) lived in for about a decade, that catered to a fairly specific subcultural melange (goth, punk, alt rock). Bit of a dive it must be said, but cheap drinks when we were students. It didn’t change with the times at all and the subcultures themselves went into decline or just aged-out of being club-goers. On closing night it was rammed with people who were sad to see it go, who wished it could stay there. The owner asked “where have you all been?” Well, we’ve been ageing, hanging out in craft ale bars and doing that a lot less often. Our appetites for hanging out in a loud, semi-subterranean dive are satisfied by an annual or biannual visit to a place we thought fondly of and thought would always be there, but didn’t really want to be in when it came to it.
- mathattack 1y agoVery true. Many of my favorite nightlife places have closed too. Then again, I gave up drinking, so I put their kids through college like I used to!
- rtpg 1y agoThe toilet story was in April, and it says "less than 6 months after the shop opened"... kinda a weird headline for a store open less than a year in the end? Or am I misunderstanding something
- gdbsjjdn 1y agoThis is insane overhead if you want to try and run a "leftist" business. It sounds like Scarlett is a trust fund baby with more money than sense. I've been running a retail business with similar inventory costs for a couple years. I have one employee and I pay them generously. I personally chip in about 20-30k annually to keep the whole thing afloat. It's definitely possible if you keep things small. Edit to add: 10k in inventory just doesn't add up. In retail you need to turn over inventory multiple times annually to cover your fixed expenses like staff, rent, etc. if you only have 10k worth of inventory and you're burning >10k a month that means you're selling everything in the store every couple weeks. I don't think books move that quickly, although I could be corrected. Usually the retail standard is turning over inventory 4-5 times annually.
- Gooblebrai 1y agoSeems like you are assuming they sold the books to cover their monthly burn. But seems it was kept afloat due to donations more than due to inventory sales
- gdbsjjdn 1y agoMy point was that this was indeed a vanity project by someone with more money than sense. At no point does it seem like they had any business plan or conception of how to make money from actually operating the business. It's just cosplaying.
- robocat 1y ago> vanity project > trust fund baby It is rather objectionable to label people with your assumptions. Unless you have some inside information you are just making shit up based on your own judgemental bigotry. People start "hobby" businesses for many reasons, and those reasons are not always status oriented. All too often I've seen idealistic people with the best intentions crash into reality (often financial reality, but often other causes as in the article).
- 1y ago
- specproc 1y agoI've actually been in there, didn't love it. I'm very much on the left, from an economic perspective at least, and a bibliophile, but I found the selection underwhelming. There weren't that many shelves and I just don't read much gender stuff, which was very much the focus. I did buy a few books, none of them particularly good. The vibe there was also a bit odd, now I reflect on it. I can definitely recommend Bookmarks off Tottenham Court Road for this sort of stuff. Great range, friendly staff, some nice merch. Got my prized Jeremy Corbyn tea towel there.