The past few months have been blisteringly busy here at Microcosm and at our group decision making meeting this past week we realized there had never been a public post explaining such a big event – as moving the mailorder across the country!
Sure, there had been traces of information here and there, but Microcosm has always represented a strong amount of public transparency in our decision making process. And we've discovered that when this doesn't occur, we are inundated with questions about "why?" and rumors begin to circulate about what our reasons might be.
Back in 2005 I became fairly set on purchasing a building to operate out of. We had vastly outgrown our office in Liberty Hall and were struggling to make everything fit. We had been around for 9 years and I saw our existence as innately temporary if we had to continually deal with a climate of rapidly raising rents. For example, in a recent interview with Sue of In Other Words Books she talked about the ten times rent increase they faced at their last location!
Microcosm sells quite a few books, zines, t-shirts, and other items, but at the end of the year, after all of our expenses we are still pretty close to zero. We don't have profits for owners, and all money is reinvested back into the project (if there is any money!). This makes it very difficult as our costs rise not to increase the prices of things we sell. We believe in selling things cheaply – at prices that we would, or even could pay for them.
So I set out on a quest to find a permanent building that we could purchase and operate out of indefinitely. Similar organizations who had succeeded for over ten years without an end in sight were the ones who owned their property and locked in their building costs.
Unfortunately for us, the quest for purchasing a building happened at possibly the worst time for purchasing commercial property in Portland. Buildings tended to start at about $400,000+ and were selling within a few weeks – sight unseen!
Eventually, through working with the city, I came across a redevelopment project in NE Portland about a mile from our current office. An old building was being gutted to be turned into a business park – of mostly small offices or retail spaces, for organizations about our size or smaller.
The biggest appeal was that it was subsidized and the loan was at 1% interest. We got involved in a lengthy and time-consuming flurry of paperwork, put down a down payment, were eventually accepted, and sat down to wait the 18 months until the transition was ready for us to move in.
Over this period, we realized the project was less and less in touch with our values. I came to understand that it would resemble a mall in a generally impoverished section of the city. We had to sign contracts that we would lock our trash to keep away vagrants and homeless people. We had to agree to photograph graffiti and report it to both the police and citizen action groups.
The contract for all of the groups purchasing the building together was being written for us by the organization who owned the building previously and was facilitating the transaction – not by the people entering into the agreement. All of these things were fishy to me and as I got the names of each of the other businesses involved I began to feel more and more alienated and started to believe we would never be able to last a year there let alone a decade. The monthly maintenance and cleaning fees alone were as much as our building payments.
Eventually I came back to the group at Microcosm and proposed that we pull out of the building. Marc, one of our staff people, indicated that he never understood why we went along with the building in the first place as he never felt like it fit. After a two week delay to think about the decision more, we ended up pulling out.
Then, last October, I went on tour for a few months which gave me good mental space to think about all of these decisions.
During that time, Alex Wrekk, for personal reasons, quit working at Microcosm without notice. She had worked at Microcosm since 2003. She conceived the idea for "Stolen Sharpie Revolution", our most popular title that her and I made collaboratively. She has often been incorrectly cited as the "head" or "founder" of Microcosm through her association, even before she was working here.
In early 2007, I lived in Bloomington, IN for a month while I did an internship at Boxcar Books. It was a time to learn from other people's projects and apply some of it to my life and Microcosm. I thought about Bloomington and how it was a comfortable place for me then. I spent two weeks there over the summer as well. It felt like a place where I could feel comfortable, get in touch with my own cultural roots in the Midwest while still preserving a town that is progressive. I could also get to know a smaller number of people well and develop bonds with them, rather than having a hundred or so people that I know loosely, or just have surface interactions with.
When I came back from tour, I expressed my interest in moving Microcosm to Bloomington. I had private discussions with each person in the decision making body to get their feedback. Bloomington seemed like a place that Microcosm could easily purchase a building to operate out of without an 18 month wait or going into unfathomable debt.
The Microcosm staff made some life decisions at this point. A few part time people quit almost right away to pursue other things. Everyone in Portland was given the option to keep their jobs even though the warehousing of books and the filling of orders would be moving to Bloomington. It made sense to keep an operation there since we deliver stuff and do lots of errands that are really linked to Portland.
Additionally, many people in Portland were pretty vocal about wanting us to keep a storefront and office with open hours there to maintain our sense of locality to Portland. Because of these requests we are opening a new office in the Portland Storage Company (the old offices of John Deere), which is a beautiful historic building in Southeast Portland. It'll be smaller, but it'll have all of the items that we publish and distribute available. Also, we still have all of our items available in Portland at In Other Words books in Portland (8 NE Killingsworth).
Only a few people decided to stay on in Portland; the work and dynamic would be changing. Everyone who worked from before the moving decision, until the day we moved out of Liberty Hall were given bonuses for staying on at such a transitory time. Everyone also had the option to keep their jobs if they wanted.
In Bloomington, Microcosm still operates with the same group decision making policies it has used for the last two years. Everyone who is employed has the opportunity to order items that they are interested in and voice their opinions about items we distribute or publish. In addition we offer a unique health plan where someone can allocate money to spend on their health in any way they see fit without the restrictions of insurance. Every year that someone remains employed they receive a $1 raise per hour. Ultimately, we feel that empowering people through their jobs is an important contrast to most drudgery that is available today.
It is our hope that these measures make Microcosm a satisfying place to work. We also hope that in Bloomington we can continue to grow and find a more productive, sustainable future. More than anything, we want to exist in five or ten years, still bringing you independently published writing in the most ethical way possible! Thanks for your support. Hopefully this answers any and all questions about the move. Take care, and keep in touch!
--Joe Biel.