Our series examining how independent booksellers in Seattle, Wash., have adjusted to the city's rising minimum wage continues today. Previous installments in the series can be found here.
Krijn de Jonge, co-owner of Queen Anne Book Company in Seattle, Wash., reported that from 2016 to 2018, the store's payroll costs rose by some 9%. Over the course of the scheduled wage increases, de Jonge and his two co-owners have tried to offset those increases by trimming hours as much as possible. QABC has six part-time employees, who together work as 3.8 full-time equivalent employees. Krijn and his wife Judy de Jonge, meanwhile, work 15 hours per week and are unpaid; general manager and co-owner Janis Segress is a full-time employee.
De Jonge and his colleagues have not drastically altered the store's inventory, though in the last year they have begun to increase the store's sidelines inventory. They've added to the selection and increased the proportion of higher-margin sidelines. The store has also put a larger focus on online sales and pre-orders, and de Jonge added that they would like to pursue more school sales and business-to-business sales. "We've tried to cut down costs as much as we can," said de Jonge. "We are focusing on increasing sales."
When asked whether the store has experienced any difficulty hiring in recent years, de Jonge answered that it has not. Juggling schedules has been a bigger challenge, but he reported that the store is very lucky in that most of the store's booksellers prefer to work part time.
He also reported that wage compression--new employees being hired at hourly rates approaching those of much more experienced employees--has not been a major issue or source of conflict at the store, though QABC has had to start paying "more experienced people more money than we thought we would have." Continued de Jonge: "They have indicated that they are happy. We're fortunate that this has not been an issue for us."
On the subject of whether the increased minimum wage has led to more discretionary spending on things like books, de Jonge answered that it was "really difficult to say." He explained that the store is in a neighborhood close to downtown, one that's seen a large amount of development in the past decade, and he doubted there were many minimum wage workers living there, other than perhaps students. He acknowledged that aside from a down year in 2017, the store's sales have gone up since the wage law was passed, but he didn't think that the minimum wage had very much to do with those increases.
"What we're struggling with in our neighborhood is the cost of living," said de Jonge. "Housing prices in our neighborhood have gone up dramatically over the recent years." According to de Jonge, few people in the service industry, as well as people like teachers and police officers, can afford to live there, especially if they have children.
Like other indie booksellers contacted for this feature, de Jonge expressed frustration with the way the city of Seattle approached the minimum wage increase. "It's great that we can afford to pay more," said de Jonge. "But the way it was done was not great." He reported that there was no study done, and to him a lot of the details seemed a bit arbitrary: "Why wasn't it $12.50 or $17.50? Why wasn't it done over a longer time?"
Troubling to him, too, was a tendency to lump all businesses together, which has persisted in recent years when the city proposed increasing the occupancy tax and establishing a corporate head tax. Though neither of those came to pass, that sort of talk has not died down.
"Businesses are always thought of as making a ton of money, because we have companies that do make a lot," said de Jonge. "Nobody thinks about smaller companies. They brush all businesses with one stroke." --Alex Mutter