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    The Funky Beauty of The Park Slope Food Co-Op - Resilience

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    The document summarizes the history and operations of the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, New York. It describes how the co-op was founded in the 1970s by ordinary neighborhood residents seeking affordable, high-quality groceries. Today it has over 17,000 members and $58 million in annual sales. Key aspects that allow it to thrive include mandatory member work shifts, democratic governance, and a focus on community over profits. While unconventional, members remain devoted due to affordable prices and sense of community.

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    The Funky Beauty of The Park Slope Food Co-Op - Resilience

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    The document summarizes the history and operations of the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, New York. It describes how the co-op was founded in the 1970s by ordinary neighborhood residents seeking affordable, high-quality groceries. Today it has over 17,000 members and $58 million in annual sales. Key aspects that allow it to thrive include mandatory member work shifts, democratic governance, and a focus on community over profits. While unconventional, members remain devoted due to affordable prices and sense of community.

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    The document summarizes the history and operations of the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, New York. It describes how the co-op was founded in the 1970s by ordinary neighborhood residents seeking affordable, high-quality groceries. Today it has over 17,000 members and $58 million in annual sales. Key aspects that allow it to thrive include mandatory member work shifts, democratic governance, and a focus on community over profits. While unconventional, members remain devoted due to affordable prices and sense of community.

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    53 views12 pages

    The Funky Beauty of The Park Slope Food Co-Op - Resilience

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    api-153890920
    The document summarizes the history and operations of the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, New York. It describes how the co-op was founded in the 1970s by ordinary neighborhood residents seeking affordable, high-quality groceries. Today it has over 17,000 members and $58 million in annual sales. Key aspects that allow it to thrive include mandatory member work shifts, democratic governance, and a focus on community over profits. While unconventional, members remain devoted due to affordable prices and sense of community.

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    6/30/2021 The Funky Beauty of the Park Slope Food Co-op - Resilience

    HOME (HTTPS://WWW.RESILIENCE.ORG/)
    /  FOOD & WATER (HTTPS://WWW.RESILIENCE.ORG/STORIES-LIST/FOODWATER/)

    The Funky Beauty of the Park Slope Food


    Co-op

    By David Bollier (https://www.resilience.org/resilience-author/david-bollier/),
    originally published by David Bollier blog
    (http://www.bollier.org/blog/funky-beauty-park-slope-food-co-op)

     January 9, 2020

    Share Tweet Print

    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.

    https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-01-09/the-funky-beauty-of-the-park-slope-food-co-op/?fbclid=IwAR35QWK1luc9bltTW2VtEAbyew99lrmF… 1/12
    6/30/2021 The Funky Beauty of the Park Slope Food Co-op - Resilience

    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.

    https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-01-09/the-funky-beauty-of-the-park-slope-food-co-op/?fbclid=IwAR35QWK1luc9bltTW2VtEAbyew99lrmF… 2/12
    6/30/2021 The Funky Beauty of the Park Slope Food Co-op - Resilience

    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 place runs on sweat equity: your blood
    for bread, your labor for lox,” as The New Yorker puts it. The system works
    because people are not “customers” who have simply bought an equity
    stake in a company. They are “member-workers” or “shoppers” who
    personally manage the place (with the help of 70 paid employees).

    https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-01-09/the-funky-beauty-of-the-park-slope-food-co-op/?fbclid=IwAR35QWK1luc9bltTW2VtEAbyew99lrmF… 3/12
    6/30/2021 The Funky Beauty of the Park Slope Food Co-op - Resilience

    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.

    Schwartz writes: “In the age of one-click delivery, it can seem antediluvian
    to trudge home with brutally heavy sacks dangling from your shoulders.
    Still, there’s a comfort to bumping up against other humans around food.
    That’s what grocery shopping used to be, before supermarkets: a social,
    neighborly time, much like the meal to follow.” The Co-op experience
    remains so appealing that many people who have moved to Connecticut or
    upstate New York continue to come to Brooklyn once a month to shop.

    To be sure, many Co-op members find the political debates about food off-
    putting:  Should plastic bags for produce be eliminated? Should foods with
    certain additives be barred from the shelves? Should the Co-op support a
    move by some paid “coordinators” (employees) to form a union?

    The New York Times has gleefully covered such issues, treating the Co-op
    “like a rogue nation-state,” writes Schwartz. There are complaints that Co-
    op membership is “a user-friendly way of experiencing the pitfalls of
    communism….There can be a mania for fetishistic rule-following in the
    name of fairness, with citizen’s arrest-style confrontations that feel more
    kindergarten bully than protector of the peace.”

    https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-01-09/the-funky-beauty-of-the-park-slope-food-co-op/?fbclid=IwAR35QWK1luc9bltTW2VtEAbyew99lrmF… 4/12
    6/30/2021 The Funky Beauty of the Park Slope Food Co-op - Resilience

    Annoying as some of these controversies may be, the Co-op has attracted
    and kept so many dedicated members precisely because it doesn’t have the
    gleaning, sterile aisles and incessant marketing of conventional
    supermarkets. It is willing to engage with the messy and endearing
    propensities of real human beings. Schwartz writes that 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.”

    Which is why it is still a thriving, beloved place after all these years.

    Share Tweet Print

    Tags: commoning (https://www.resilience.org/tag/commoning/),


    cooperatives (https://www.resilience.org/tag/cooperatives/)

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    Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and as cofounder of
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