In 2001, a science-fiction bookstore called Borderlands Books, whose claim to fame was that a local newspaper had once called it San Francisco’s “Best Place to Meet Kinky Space Cadets,” moved into the city’s Mission District. Before long, the newspaper had awarded the store a loftier distinction: the “Best Sign of Degentrification in the Mission.” Truth be told, it didn’t have much competition. The Internet boom was turning the Mission from a neighborhood made up of working-class Latino families into a destination for young hipsters—its nonprofits and Latino groceries replaced by dot-com offices, upscale lofts, and restaurants. From 2000 to 2010, the proportion of Latinos living in the Census Bureau area that includes the Mission fell from nearly half of the total population to less than forty per cent. Through all of this, Borderlands stayed open on Valencia Street.

Then, on Sunday, the store’s owner, Alan Beatts, and its general manager, Jude Feldman, posted a startling message on the Borderlands Web site. As of March, they wrote, they would be shutting the store down—not so much for the usual reasons that bookstores close (rent hikes, Amazon, iPads), but because San Francisco plans to raise its minimum wage over the next three years from less than eleven dollars an hour, as of last year, to fifteen dollars an hour. The increase is the result of a local ballot measure passed in November, which was one of several successful local and state minimum-wage initiatives nationwide. The increase in San Francisco would make the city’s minimum wage equal to Seattle's as the highest in the nation. It would also, Beatts and Feldman wrote, render Borderlands unprofitable. “Although all of us at Borderlands support the concept of a living wage in principal and we believe that it’s possible that the new law will be good for San Francisco,” they wrote, “Borderlands Books as it exists is not a financially viable business if subject to that minimum wage.”

The letter was soon seized on by conservative news outlets. On Tuesday, the Web site Breitbart posted an article about the store’s closure with the headline: “Liberals Surprised Beloved Bookstore Closes Due to Minimum Wage Hikes.” By Wednesday, Beatts was fielding inquiries from other conservative outlets about his thoughts on how government regulations are killing small businesses. He explained, with some awkwardness, that he actually supports the minimum-wage increase. “There are tens of thousands of people in this city that are going to benefit,” he told me later. “Businesses are going to pass the costs to consumers, and the product of that money that’s being spent is going to go to the lowest-paid people in this city. I think that’s a good thing. But the mathematics of it says that I can’t keep running my business.”

Despite all the attention that the announcement has gotten online, business at the store has carried on as usual, at least for now. On Wednesday evening, a couple of customers quietly browsed the lamp-lit shelves; one man took down a book, sat down in a chair to leaf through it for a while, then got a saleswoman to put it back for him and left. A couple of employees helped customers and manned the checkout counter. Beatts fielded phone calls. He is tall and slender, with a ponytail, piercings in each ear, and the features of a somewhat-less-melancholic Steve Buscemi. Beginning with his original blog post with Feldman, and in further posts and interviews since, Beatts has been unusually open about the store's finances. Payroll was the biggest expense last year—it made up forty-two per cent of expenses, followed by rent, which amounted to twenty per cent; the remaining expenses were minimal, each amounting to six per cent or less. This is typical for an independent bookstore, and it means that wage increases have a disproportionate influence on overall expenses.

Beatts employs five people beside himself, only one of whom works full time, and they all get paid minimum wage, or a couple of cents more; last year, that amounted to less than eleven dollars an hour. His own wages are slightly higher—he made twenty-eight thousand dollars last year, which, accounting for a forty-hour work week and no vacation time, comes to about thirteen dollars an hour. (“If people think I’m lighting hundred-dollar cigars with hundred-dollar bills back in the office, it’s like, that’s not happening,” he said, noting that he usually works fifty or sixty hours a week.) Overall, raising wages to fifteen dollars an hour would increase the store’s operating expenses by nearly twenty per cent. In 2013, Borderlands turned a profit of about three thousand dollars; the higher expenses would mean a loss of about twenty-five thousand dollars. (For a lot of small businesses, especially in San Francisco, rent increases are the main reason for going out of business; Beatts’s said that his lease at Borderlands comes up for renewal next year, but that he has a good personal relationship with the landlord and—though he admits this might be naïve—wouldn’t expect his rent to rise considerably.)

Beatts ran the numbers on the minimum-wage increase early last year, when people started talking about putting it on the citywide ballot. In November, the measure passed overwhelmingly, but Beatts kept quiet about how it would impact his store; with the holiday season approaching, he didn’t want potential customers to get confused and think that the store had already closed. Then, in January, the first phase of the minimum-wage hike went into effect, raising wages to more than eleven dollars an hour. Beatts had considered some options for staying open—taking donations, selling memberships that would include special benefits, finding benefactors to buy real estate where Borderlands could operate rent-free—but found none of them to be workable. Nor could he raise book prices, the way a restaurant might hike menu prices or a clothing store might raise the prices of dresses; people expect to pay the price that is printed on a book cover, and, while he could charge more, he didn’t think that would go over well. And he didn’t want to continue on in the knowledge that the store wouldn’t be viable once the minimum wage had risen beyond a certain point. So, on Sunday, he announced his plan to close, and the reason for it. He said that he wanted to be transparent with his customers, but he also hoped to make the city aware of one consequence of the minimum-wage increase, with the hope that it might compel local lawmakers and the public to more seriously consider the impact on small businesses before passing policies like this in the future. (Although he supported the minimum-wage increase, in principle, he would have preferred a two-tier system, in which bigger retailers—measured by number of employees, or sales, or some other factor—would pay a higher minimum wage than smaller ones.)

The public nature of the announcement—and the politics that have gotten mixed up in it—rankled some customers and booksellers, who felt that Beatts shouldn’t give up so soon. Still, few had feasible suggestions for how Borderlands could stay open. Kate Rosenberger, who owns two bookstores in the city, one of which is down the street from Borderlands, told me that when she heard about Beatts’s letter, “What I wanted to do is call and tell him, ‘Don’t close, don’t close.’” But Rosenberger has herself recently stopped operating two other bookstores. Her best idea was for Beatts to sell his shop to someone else. Beatts planned to hold a meeting, the following week, to hear patrons’ ideas on how to keep the store alive. Privately, though, he doubted anything would turn up.