Earlier this month, Alan Beatts, the owner of a science-fiction bookstore in San Francisco’s Mission District, announced that a minimum-wage increase recently passed by the city’s voters, from less than eleven dollars an hour last year to fifteen dollars an hour by 2018, was going to put him out of business. Not long afterward, I met Beatts at his shop, Borderlands Books, and he seemed utterly defeated; Borderlands is barely profitable, and the minimum-wage increase would all but guarantee the store a significant loss. The difference was too large to make up for by reducing other costs, like rent or utility bills. In a piece on Borderlands’s closure, I wrote that, while Beatts planned to hold a meeting to hear thoughts from customers about how he might keep his store open, he doubted that it would bring to the surface any usable ideas.

By the time the meeting came around, on February 12th, Beatts’s announcement had gone viral. To those who oppose higher minimum wages, it was a vindication: if a business owner in a liberal city like San Francisco was upset about a minimum-wage increase, it must be bad. To those who support minimum-wage increases, Beatts was cast as a traitor to the cause. Concerned that some of his critics might show up at the meeting to heckle him, he asked a friend who planned to attend, and also happened to be a cop, to keep an eye out, in case anyone got aggressive.

The hundred or so people who showed up mostly had support to offer and ideas to share. One was to sell memberships to people who were willing to be charged simply to have Borderlands continue to exist. This notion had occurred to Beatts, but he had dismissed it as too much like asking for a handout. But, at the meeting, people seemed amused—even intrigued—by the idea. Based on their comments, and on e-mails received over the following days, it occurred to Beatts that, to his customers, something like a membership might seem not only like an opportunity to help Borderlands but also like a genuine business transaction: they would be paying for the continued existence of what, to them, was an important gathering place for science-fiction readers.

As Beatts considered what to do, his initial stance was still being claimed by conservative commentators on wage issues. On Thursday, Walmart announced that it would raise its lowest wage to ten dollars an hour; in a statement, the research director of the right-leaning Employment Policies Institute cited an op-ed he had written in the San Francisco Examiner about the impending closure of Borderlands and other negative consequences of San Francisco’s minimum-wage hike. But, later that day, the Borderlands staff made its own announcement—in the form of a blog post on the store’s Web site. In short, Borderlands might not be closing after all. “Starting immediately we will be offering paid sponsorships of the store,” the staff wrote. Each sponsorship—Beatts and his staff opted for that name in lieu of “membership”—would cost a hundred dollars annually and would include a number of perks that wouldn’t cost anything for Borderlands: the ability to rent, at cost, the Borderlands café; invitations to exclusive events; access to preview sales of rare and collectible books; and so on.

If Borderlands sells three hundred sponsorships before the end of March, it will stay open for the rest of the year; next year, Borderlands will sell memberships again, with the same end-of-March deadline and the same plan to close up shop if it can’t meet it. Within a couple of hours after the blog post went up Thursday evening, more than sixty memberships had been sold; when I spoke to Beatts on Saturday morning, he reported that the figure had passed two hundred and thirty, and seemed on track to clear the goal of three hundred.

Beatts told me, “I actually don’t know of a retail business like a bookstore that has done something like this, because everybody else had tied it to a mercantile element—like, ‘You’re a member, so you get a discount. We will reduce the amount that you spend with us because you support us.’ We’re really trying to move away from that. What the sponsors are trying to accomplish is, flatly, just to keep my business operating. No one wants a discount. No one wants free books.”

In a sense, the model merely restores the notion of a store “patron” to something closer to the word’s original meaning. But it appears to be a relatively unusual approach for a retail store—essentially putting a price tag on Borderlands’s continued existence, and the cultural and social benefits that come with it, rather than tying memberships to some monetary benefit like book discounts. It could prove instructive, though, to other cultural and social enterprises that have enthusiastic fan bases but whose business models are facing rising costs or other pressures. “The word ‘cultural’ can seem a little bit pretentious, and I hate to say, ‘Bookstores are part of the cultural fabric of the United States,’ because I’m selling something that’s marginally better than reality TV, I’m selling entertainment—but, yeah, it is something like that,” Beatts told me. One can imagine a video store selling annual sponsorships that come with access to special movie nights, for instance, or a journalism organization that offers its articles for free but sells annual subscriptions to a private lecture series featuring its journalists.

Perhaps, Beatts said, the model could extend even beyond traditional cultural enterprises. He mentioned to me that a couple of restaurants in the neighborhood where he lives have recently closed down. He told me that he would have gladly paid a hundred dollars a year so that they could have stayed open; maybe they could have offered him priority brunch seating in exchange, or some similar perk. “I wonder if this idea—‘Look, if you put up this money, we get to stay in business, and in exchange we will do these things for you to demonstrate our appreciation’—I wonder how many businesses that might work for,” Beatts said. “It could be applicable anywhere.”