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So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

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Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#201

Post by bsenftner »

zeure wrote: post #199
bsenftner wrote: post #189

I was a founder and operator of the Los Angeles free co-working space DropLabs. We lasted for 3 years before closing out of lack of interest. We never intended anything other than a free place for geeks to collect and work. We had events in the evenings, which were fairly popular. Having multiple partners with graduate business degrees, we chose not to incorporate, we just rented a space and called it "Droplabs" (why…

Location is the most important thing in marketing a physical area.

We were located "next door" to The Brewery, the world largest freelance artist community (35K freelance artists living and working in a former brewery compound near downtown.) The artists used us far more than the geeks we were tying to attract.

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#202

Post by l0b0 »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #66
l0b0 wrote: post #4

A recent experience from a hackerspace showed me how incredibly thankless people can be. After working really insanely hard to build an inclusive space with loads of features, every little hobby revolutionary in the community just shits all over the work and proclaims the people actually getting stuff done should just stop and leave it to them. Even if I had the time, money and expertise I would never do something li…

...incredibly thankless people can be... I hear you. But to be fair can we generalize less and say __some__ people? I'd also venture to say that the internet has educated more people in the art of self-expression. Like any art, doing it, and being good at it are two different things. Simultaneously, we're over stimulated, and have become less tolerant of "feedback." I certainly not going to dispute The A-hole Factor.…

I'm not an English native speaker, but I though "foo can be bar" was equivalent to "some foo are bar".

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#203

Post by praptak »

rpeden wrote: post #61
wayanon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So did I get it the wrong way round, people have kids so they don’t risk failing in a business?

No, praptak was saying that some people start a business because they fear that if they don't, they'll look back on their life and regret that they didn't start a business, and that this is similar to the way some people decide to have children just because they fear that they'd regret not having them.

Minor correction: I'm not the author of the original analogy. I just explained it.

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#204

Post by simonebrunozzi »

bsenftner wrote: post #189

I was a founder and operator of the Los Angeles free co-working space DropLabs. We lasted for 3 years before closing out of lack of interest. We never intended anything other than a free place for geeks to collect and work. We had events in the evenings, which were fairly popular. Having multiple partners with graduate business degrees, we chose not to incorporate, we just rented a space and called it "Droplabs" (why…

This is a really clever comment, regarding WeWork essentially being (to summarize a bit) a dating app.

I would love to hear more about your experience.

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#205

Post by simonebrunozzi »

heronymus wrote: post #92
ghaff wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially the branding although process and scale probably help too. I used to think that, when Starbucks started selling coffee to every hotel that filled up urns for meeting rooms, it would be some serious brand dilution. But it wasn't. Coffee snobs like those downthread notwithstanding, most people don't care. I don't care most of the time although I try to frequent local shops for the variety. So anything that g…

Not a native speaker, I don't understand the meaning of "filled up urns for meeting rooms"?

heronymus, if it is still not clear, the "urn" is the large coffee pot.

(not a native English speaker myself, and I tried my best to interpret your difficulty).

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#206

Post by School-Cotton »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #154
School-Cotton wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can walk into almost any cafe in the country and get a much better cup of coffee at a comparable price. This is also true in the United States and yet here we are.

It wasn't when Starbucks started. There used to be a real dearth of quality prepared coffee in America, and Starbucks was often the first place in many towns (not talking NYC or LA or San Fran or Chicago) to get a decent cup of coffee. I don't know what to take from that though with regard to what y'all are arguing about, I can't really explain the economics of it all. But I think it's a fact that at the point Starbu…

Well, I agree with you, but it doesn't contradict my point.

The fact that now, in 2018, it's possible to easily get high-quality coffee in Australia is not a complete explanation of why Starbucks is not popular there, since the same is true of the United States.

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#207

Post by antt »

jurassic wrote: post #186
antt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing about it would drive you insane, here it is in image, gif and email form: https://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com shitnoisebridgesays.tumblr.com A high point for me was getting my site ddos'd and ssh brute force attacked when I decided to run a course in another hacker space after being stuck for committee approval for 3 months. The saddest part is that I knew it would happen and scraped the site into a static…

Early in my career, I nearly quit tech because of a negative experience I had with some douchebros at a noisebridge javascript event. In retrospect those guys were just a couple insecure idiots and really not representative of the average tech man, but as a woman trying to break into the industry I thought that’s what I was going to have to deal with every day in every job. Nonetheless I persisted.

Yes, there's also the classic using the hackers pace as a dating pool because you have no social skills. The introductory electronics project for women I wanted to make was the consentinator, a taster that would play 'no means no' while it's zapping something. The women I bounced the idea off all thought it was great, the guy on the committee who was using the space to try and get dates called me sexist for even suggesting a project based on gender instead of treating everyone like a hacker.

If you have the time look up the girl who ran the first tumbler. She's hilarious and had a few talks about this stuff. As well as some really great advice on how not to build robots.

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#208

Post by Symbiote »

mcguire wrote: post #144
Symbiote wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like a common setup [1], and of the ones with pictures several don't have a manual override. [1] https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Doorlock

A door without a crash bar in a public space?

I have learnt a new American word :-)

In British, I never knew what they were called ("those 'Push Bar To Open' things on fire doors"), apparently "panic bar". As Wikipedia[1] says, "In Europe, the use of panic bars is generally confined to code required applications. On the other hand, in US and Canadian commercial building design panic bars are frequently used even when not required by code."

The only place I see them is designated emergency exits, the type which are normally unopenable from outside and often alarmed. The main doors leading out of a large auditorium don't use them – these don't need to lock, so they use free-swinging doors. The emergency doors at the front/side would use them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_bar

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#209

Post by [deleted] »

endomatrix wrote: post #14
chrisseaton wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do coffee shops like Starbucks mange to support 20 working part time plus a corporate headquarters and make a profit, from the same small store you would operate as a hobby?

I have a friend who runs a brewery. They distribute a ridiculous amount of their product into stores around the world and have won many awards, yet they make very little margin from all that. He told me they make an overwhelming amount of money off of the tasting room attached to their physical brewery because the beer itself is effectively water in terms of cost so they make profit by not having to pay any middle me…

[deleted]

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#210

Post by larkeith »

chrisseaton wrote: post #7
jaggederest wrote: post #2

The economics of hobby businesses, like bookstores and coffee shops and art galleries, are almost always such that you can either feed it the equivalent of a full time salary, or work there every hour it's open yourself, because the kind of business is one that other people want to do for free as a hobby. This means that, unless you want to be a slave to your own business, you'd better have $50k a year minimum passiv…

So how do coffee shops like Starbucks mange to support 20 working part time plus a corporate headquarters and make a profit, from the same small store you would operate as a hobby?

One advantage I feel like is underappreciated is that Starbucks are functionally standardized - If I fly into a new city I've never been to before, I can still be pretty certain that I'll find a Starbucks in the airport, with the same menu, a familiar design, and similar prices, while a local place is always a bit more of a gamble (not to mention harder to find).
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