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Comment by quickfox | Hacker News Reader

This was a way to save a much-loved bookstore. It's interesting that it's still holding up after 2 years.

Not just hanging on, it appears to be stabilizing. At the end of March, they had actually sold a handful of more sponsorships in year 3 than they had by the same time in year 2. The goal now is to use the additional funds to purchase a building in SF to be a permanent home for the store once the current lease runs out.

I love this. It's both the epitome of anti capitalism, while being so completely fundamental free trade, that it almost makes my head explode (as a university trained economist). I especially love that many who espouse capitalistic ideals will have a hard time wrapping their minds around this too. It's so easy to forget that any time money changes hands without extortion involved that's capitalism at it's finest. And the fact that the store is looking to the future, and using the patronage (in it's most classical sense) to increase it's capital to help stabilize itself in the long term just really makes me smile from all the dichotomous ideas at play.

I mean, it's not really capitalism. It's liberty.

Capitalism works under a lot of assumptions, one of them is no friction with information. This particular story is just taking advantage of a small, imperceptible (to the rentors) risk capital gap, but some savvy and attached fans saw it and wanted to take advantage of it.

It's just like a lot of microfinance in say a poor struggling neighborhood in Bangladesh. There's money to be made there, but most traditional bankers or participants would ignore it or be blind to it. When socialism steps in is not when it's able to cover that gap, but when it has the foresight or wisdom to know why that gap should be covered. That wisdom is something that doesn't always happen in less than ideal capitalist systems.

It's not anti-capitalism — people are paying for the existence of something they want. How is that antithetical to a competitive market?

And why would someone who espouses capitalistic ideals struggle to wrap their head around it? It's a pretty simple concept.

It's an interesting example of the value of customer goodwill.

In addition to being a bookshop, Borderlands is a cultural hub for SF/F readers in the Bay Area. As such, it's not simply selling SKUs at the cheapest viable price, it's providing an intangible curatorial service. Amazon may crowdsource reader reviews but they're unlikely to be as insightful as suggestions by enthusiastic staff who know what they're selling, and the usual recommendations engines are less effective than one of those staff engaging in Q&A with a customer to find something new that they might like.

(And this is before we get into things like the cafe side of the business, or the author readings/signings. Disclaimer: I am an author and I occasionally do events there.)

This is why I signed up.

This is a perfectly rational response in a capitalistic society. Sponsors obtain value from sponsorship through perks, social signaling, continued existence of Borderlands, personal gratification, and so on. On the other side of the transaction, Borderlands monetizes it's social and goodwill capital.

This exchange of value for money is done in a way that may be somewhat unique for a retail establishment, but isn't anywhere close to anti-capitalistic.

Just another reminder that the money (and the people behind it) just do whatever they want Honeybadger style, and we scramble along behind them trying to stick labels on what just happened.

> It's so easy to forget that any time money changes hands without extortion involved that's capitalism at it's finest.

I thought that the existence of an individual or group of individuals who hold material wealth and can invest it (those who hold capital, or capitalists) instead of selling labor was capitalism at its core, and maybe therefore at its finest - is that not your take on it?

How is selling a premium service to make more money by using a clever marketing campaign that labels it as a "sponsorship" anti-capitalist?

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