At the Park Slope Food Co-Op, the spices go for pennies, the cheese is crazy cheap, and members spend 15 to 50 per cent less than they would elsewhere. But the perks come with a side of politics.
“I would chew off my own arm to get out of there,” a colleague told me. But her family saves too much money on food to quit. The Co-op has a flat, twenty-one-per-cent markup on most things it sells, which means that members pay fifteen to fifty per cent less than they would at another grocery store. The aggressively fresh produce is less expensive than the greenmarket’s. The spices go for pennies; the cheese is crazy cheap.
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.
That was a sentiment shared by the Co-op’s precursors. In 1844, following a failed strike, a group of desperate weavers in the rapidly industrializing English city of Rochdale created the first successful modern consumers’ coöperative. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, as it was called, was run democratically, with one vote per member. Its general store included a lending library, to promote education.
Holtz and I were sitting in a small meeting room on the Co-op’s second floor, where the staff have their offices. He had left the door open, and our conversation was punctuated by the call-and-response patter of the intercom, the building’s non-stop soundtrack.“Shopping member, all cornmeal is gluten-free.”
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