Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn
= the original model of the new wave of food coops where members volunteer a few hours per month in exchange for substantial discounts, based in Brooklyn, NY
URL = https://www.foodcoop.com/
Description
Silke Helfrich and David Bollier: “To visit the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, New York, is to experience a supermarket that has been transformed to live, breathe, and function instead as a social community. The Coop is a busy, well-organized and fully staffed operation like most any other supermarket. But this place, in the heart of New York City’s commercial culture (Manhattan is two miles away), feels very different. The Coop isn’t a business that seeks to pander, cajole, and flatter its customers to buy, buy, buy. There is no promotional signage or splashy displays designed to spur impulse purchases. The Coop has a rather simple goal, skillfully enacted: to let people obtain high-quality food inexpensively by “buying from themselves.”
It takes a moment to realize that all the cashiers ringing up groceries at the check-out counters are not employees. Everyone who works there is a coop member themselves – perhaps even a friend or neighbor. More than 17,000 members take care of everything, from unloading trucks and stocking shelves to serving up delicatessen meats and cleaning up – without pay."
(Source - From Free Fair and Alive, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich Ch 8, p238)
Discussion
David Bollier:
"In the nearly 50 years since the Park Slope Food Co-op Brooklyn opened, it has become both legendary and taken-for-granted. People seem to forget that its success was based on heroic struggle and lots of difficult internal commoning. Many outsiders see a gilded precinct of New York City filled with affluent professionals, not realizing that the Co-op arose from within a funky neighborhood of ordinary people who wanted high-quality, affordable, responsibly produced groceries. And indeed, most of its members are still ordinary, middle-class New Yorkers.
A lengthy piece in The New Yorker magazine (November 25 issue) captures the complicated and colorful history of the Co-op magnificently. “The Grocery Store Where Produce Meets Politics,” by Alexandra Schwartz, dives deeply into the inner life of the Co-op and the people who both venerate it and condescend to it. The Park Slope Food Co-op is a landmark achievement of what can be achieved through commoning in a co-operative organizational structure.
The Co-op's most salient achievement may be its sheer scale. It has more than 17,000 members and annual sales revenues of $58.3 million. Yet it is still run as a participatory, democratically managed operation whose members actively care about eco-friendly agriculture and socially minded practices.
Unlike many co-ops that regard themselves as quasi-corporations competing in the market, perhaps with a nod to social concern, the Park Slope Food Co-op remains unabashedly committed to functioning as a commons. It is a self-help collective, as one of its leaders put it, not a do-gooder project.
In her early encounters with the Co-op, journalist Alexandra Schwartz found it “to be claustrophobically crowded, illogically organized, and almost absurdly inconvenient. In other words, it was love at first sight. Suddenly, on my editorial assistant’s salary, I was eating like an editor-in-chief.” The Co-op is not a sleek, modernist Whole Foods store with precious upscale touches. It’s a place where you can get fantastically fresh local produce, inexpensive cheese, and high-quality expeller-pressed cooking oils. Prices are generally 15% to 50% less than those of a conventional grocery store." (http://www.bollier.org/blog/funky-beauty-park-slope-food-co-op)