“Funky around the edges, humanly fermented, alive”. How the Park Slope Food Coop makes a commons (and great produce)
We are very much enjoying diving into David Bollier and Silke Helfrich’s Free Fair and Alive: the Insurgent Power of the Commons—for many reasons, but mostly for the fantastic exemplars of commons-like enterprises, functioning historically well, that they have curated.
This one is Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Co-op - founded at the height of the counterculture in 1973, but now having evolved into something of a template for how high quality and sustainable services can be provided, in a cooperative and commons-oriented way.
Bollier ran this piece recently in Resilience to describe what Park Slope does:
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.
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.
While popular commercial grocery stores like Trader Joe’s make impressive sales of about $2,500 per square foot of retail space, the Park Slope Food Co-op rakes in an astonishing $10,000 per square foot,” Schwartz reports.
But such things are not being driven by market forces; they arise and flourish through group cooperation. Everyone needs to have some skin in the game and abide by the Co-op’s rules.
One of the most important rules is the requirement that everyone work two hours and forty-five minutes every four weeks. This rule is strictly enforced. If you miss your shift, you have to make it up by working two compensatory shifts. Fall behind too much in your work obligations, and your Co-op privileges may be revoked.
In other words, the Co-op is not just a financial collective that you buy into. It is a personal commitment that you have to take seriously. You have to commit your personal time and energies to the everyday operation of the Co-op by unloading delivery trucks, cutting up cheese into chunks, cleaning floors and toilets, working the cash register, and taking care of kids in the free child-care room, and so on.
It’s the unpaid, decommodified labor of thousands of members that enables the Co-op to function so well… The Co-op represents what Silke Helfrich and I call “relationalized property” – a “resource” that is not just a hunk of capital designed to produce profit, but a social collective whose personal and social lives are intertwined with the asset.
The Co-op is as much a cultural experience as an economic bargain. People shop in a crowded, no-nonsense space filled with every kind of New Yorker imaginable. They understand the messy complications of peer governance and provisioning.
More here - and signs that a commons-enterprise is hardly a quiet life. Bollier is partly picking up here on a New Yorker article which goes into much great reportorial depth about the history, practice and tensions of the Park Slope Food Coop (which this promotional video sweetly glides over).
The writer Alexandra Schwartz joined the Coop, did her allotted time, and seems to have found it a “relational” experience:
I joined the Co-op in 2013, and 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. I loved the communal, chatty ethos.
The Park Slope Coop (and the Fire Station next door), Brooklyn
And I loved that it looked like New York, with people of all colors and kinds: vegan Rastafarians next to paleo trustafarians, budget-conscious retirees and profligate brownstone owners, queer parents and Hasids, the very young and the very old.
I work checkout on the 10:30-to-1:15 shift on Sunday mornings: the height of the madness, when the queue to reach the registers winds intestinally through the cart-crammed aisles… I have to say that I am inordinately proud of my skills at that post. I am quick and ruthlessly efficient, which are not qualities that I tend to associate with my performance of my regular job.
It is satisfying, for someone who spends so much time playing with words on a screen, to be of practical use. I have the P.L.U. codes for bananas, avocados, and lemons in my fingertips. I know how to tell mustard greens from dandelion, quinces from Asian pears.
Sometimes, cruising through a shopper’s load in a blissful state of flow, I fantasize about racing other checkout workers for the title of Fastest Register, though this would surely be deemed “uncoöperative,” the worst of all Co-op sins.
You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear.
You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them.
It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart.
Shoppers unload their produce in great wet heaps onto the checkout counters and do their own packing, using bags that they bring from home or the store’s cardboard boxes, recycled from the day’s deliveries; to ease congestion, members on the shift are deputized to help, though not everyone appreciates an intervention.
One Sunday morning, I heard a keening wail rise from a register near mine: it came from an older woman whose meticulous organizational system, known only to her, was being cheerfully undermined by a well-intentioned assistant.
And yet the Co-op’s small-scale errors and outcries and inefficiencies make the place feel organic, in the non-U.S.D.A.-regulated sense of the word: funky around the edges, humanly fermented, alive.