Park Slope Food Coop is legendary in Brooklyn. It’s the place progressive mummies and daddies and students and veggies go to get fresh, organic food at very cheap prices. According to their website it’s “the largest wholly member-owned and operated food coop in the country.” And according to Simon’s Brain it’s a nightmare:
If you are one of those naïve people (younger than 25) who think communism is a good idea in principle, you need to spend 30 minutes in the food Coop. See how petty, bitter and mean people become when they are working for the collective. Everyone is paranoid that everyone else is shirking on their responsibilities, not working hard enough or disobeying a rule they themselves obey. I’ve been told off more times than I can count for such minor offences as leaving the queue for a moment to grab something I forgot, having 16 items in my basket instead of 15 when on line in the xpress queue, reaching over somebody’s head, not having my membership card out and ready the second it was requested and on and on… By the time you are done in there you want to shatter glass with a hysterical screaming fit.
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That is so insane - my dad just told me about his experience at the Co-Op in Rochester, NY. He was in there with a colleague from his school and they were talking about the soup choices - one of the workers thought she detected a hint of disdain in my dad’s voice when he described the lentil soup - so she told my dad to “fuck himself”. My dad decided to talk to the woman as she was ringing up his lunch - “I hope you don’t think I was being hateful toward lentil soup.” The woman rang up my dad’s minestrone soup, and put it in the bag - upside down. My dad said he will no longer frequent the Co-Op.
When I lived in Atlanta there was this co-op called Sevenanda. While they were a co-op, they also allowed non-members to shop there and had fulltime employees. I’ve never had a bad experience shopping there. It seems their model of operations doesn’t have the same problems as the Park Slope co-op.
Communism in practice
Simon’s Brain writes about the food co-op in Brooklyn: The good things: quality food at low prices (20% above wholesale). The bad things: the work, the busybodies, the queues, the chaos, the untrained staff, the weird smell, the claustrophobic atmosph…
I spent a couple of years in new wave food co-ops starting back in the 70’s and many of them are more petty than academia … little dictatorships of self-righteous food Nazis, and usually of a *very* far left persuasion
Big Apple Blog Festival - December 12, 2005
Last week’s Big Apple Blog Festival was hosted by Harleys, Cars, Girls & Guitars. This week’s Big Apple Blog Festival is hosted by NYC Stories. Some excerpts: An Englishman in New York reports on the Park Slope Food Coop…
I’m over 25 and have belonged to the Park Slope Food Coop for over 10 years.
While it is often entertaining and good sport to bash the idealistic and bash the place one is leaving (see Simon’s Brain), the Coop is not at all as bad as described.
It is a Cooperative - meaning every shopper and employee is also a member and works at least 2 hours and 45 minutes per month. It is the largest member-only cooperative in the country and one of the oldest. As it has over 15,000 members, there are indeed tight rules (and sometimes well-meaning over-worded instructions) for working and shopping. This is necessary to coordinate the duties of the individuals who appear to work less than 3 hours every 4 weeks.
Imagine how well run your local D’Agostino would be if it was run by 15,000 unpaid people who showed up a few hours every 4 weeks.
I should mention a few of the special things the Park Slope Food does: Child care while parents shop, gourmet and health food at 21% above cost, escort for you and your groceries within the few surrounding blocks, donation of excess food to soup kitchen and rotten food to compost at local comunity garden. Meanwhile this store has one of the cleanest NYG health dept. records of any establishment in the city ever.
It is not without faults, which I could also list, but it has much to offer.
I just had to react to the malcontent putting down the CO-OP. While not perfect (like life) it is a viable alternative to overpriced gourmet shops and discusting dirty minimum wage places like Key Food, where the workers deal out disdain on a daily basis. I have been a member of the COOP for over 3o years and have had 1 rude experience. It is a Cooperative, not a socialistic state. The writer of this letter hopes the general public will not get the extremely skewed view offered by Mr. Englishman. PS Feel free to print my e-mail as I would welcome discourse about this all important institution.
it’s a shame. i read a lot of simliar stuff about the park slope food co-op before i joined and it made me a little apprehensive, but after being a member for less than a year, i LOVE it. sure, it’s quirky. some people are strange, but most are pretty cool and you cannot get better quality fresh organic produce in new york city for the price.
Cool!!! It is great!!!!
I’ve been a member of the co-op for about a year now. It’s true that sometimes you encounter annoying behavior, but nothing worse than I’ve experienced at every other grocery store in NYC. I think there has been some additional stress placed on the co-op in recent years because since 2000, the membership has almost DOUBLED, while the shopping space and warehouse space has remained the same.
I’m not surprised that the membership has doubled. Grocery stores in NYC seem to be of either two varieties these days: incredibly expensive gourmet markets like Whole Foods on the one hand, or filthy stores reeking of rotting food and featuring cashiers who at worst are blatantly rude and at best won’t make eye contact or speak to the shopper.
While I will certainly not claim that my experience is common at the Park Slope Food Co-op, it certainly left a bitter taste in my mouth.
I joined the Co-op about two and a half years ago on the suggestion of a friend.
Members are required to work 2 3/4 hours in every four-week period. One of the few exceptions available to this requirement is for people who provide a valid medical reason.
I had such a reason. I was suffering from severe sciatica and was unable to stand for more then five minutes without excruciating pain.
Instead of taking the medical “out,” though, I decided to be a good guy and do any kind of work that did not involve standing.
I informed the office of my decision and they agreed to provide me an office job.
A few days later I was assigned my first shift.
A few days before that first shift, I received another phone call from the office. This time they informed me that the job they had originally offered me involved a lot of standing so they reassigned me.
The reassigned shift was scheduled to take place a few days later than my first shift.
The night of that shift I arrived at the Co-op and found the Squad Leader. I told her I was assigned to a job in the office, to which she responded huffily: “There are no jobs in the office.”
OK. So much for my reassignment. What could I do? I did the job the Squad Leader assigned me, which consisted of bagging nuts and other items in the basement. There was some standing but it was bearable.
At the end of the shift, the Squad Leader came down to take attendance which resulted in the following exchange:
Squad Leader: “What is your name?”
Me: I stated my name
Squad Leader (checking her roster): “You’re not on my list.”
Me: “That’s probably because I was supposed to work in the office.”
Squad Leader (ignoring my response): “Well I’ll give you the credit for the work you did anyway.”
The next day I went to shop and was informed that I was suspended.
I was a little surprised since I had worked only the night before. I was informed this wasn’t unusual and that the credit for my work probably hadn’t been applied yet. I was told to go to the office to work it out.
So up I went. There I dealt with a woman who seemed like the manager, a European from a Germanic or Scandinavian country.
She told me that my there was no clerical error, that my shift had in fact been recorded.
The problem is that I had gone my first four weeks of membership without completing a work shift.
I told her the story of my sciatica and the fact that the office had reassigned my first work shift, resulting in the fact that it now occurred after my first four weeks of membership.
The following exchange then took place:
Me: “So what do I do now in order to remove my suspension?”
Manager: “You need to work a shift plus a make-up [Co-op members who miss a shift are penalized by having to work a 2nd shift].”
Me: “But I worked the very first shift you assigned me.”
Manager: “Doesn’t matter. Every member must work at least one shift every four weeks.”
Me: “But I don’t understand why I’m penalized for the fact that your office scheduled my first work shift beyond the four-week period.”
Manager: “Doesn’t matter, rules are rules.”
Faced with the prospect of having to work two additional shifts as punishment for having done nothing wrong (I don’t understand how I was supposed to work before the very first shift they assigned me) I decided to quite the Co-op, 32 days after I joined it.
As I filled out my paperwork to cancel the membership, the manager actually tried to convince me to let the Co-op keep my deposit.
My big mistake, of course, was trying to be good guy by not pursuing the medical dispensation. But the fact that someone who goes out of their way to be helpful ends up being penalized does not speak well of the Co-op.
In the end, as a grocery store it really wasn’t bad. Although regarding prices, while they were good especially for organic goods, there wasn’t a night-and-day difference with other choices in NYC.
For me, though, there was way too much drama and shmertz for what is just buying food. I hardly felt as if I was “changing the world” by engaging in what is basically the very bourgeois act of purchasing luxury food.
I second the comments made by others about the generally brusque and unfriendly manner.
The worst thing about the whole episode is that, like anything else, the Park Slope Food Co-op is hardly above normal human pettiness.
For all the Robespierre-like rigidity demonstrated by the Office Manager in my case, I have a number of friends who have not worked a single shift at the Co-op in years. They know the right people and they know how to play the game.
All the power to them. Nice guys finish last, even among collectivists…
I’ve been a member for about 14 years, and was a squad leader for 8 years. When I joined the coop, it was like a family. The squads worked well together, and the paid coordinators worked well with the squad. Alas, that model has ceased.
Now, the model appears to have shifted from cooperation to dictatorship, from benign anarchy to fascism. There are rules within rules, and there always seems to be a “coop cop” ready to randomly enforce them. Big Brother is indeed watching.
Moreover, any semblance of democracy is a farce, in that the real decision making is performed not by membership as a whole, but at a General Meeting. This meeting is often stacked in advance by the Paid Coordinators, their friends and syncophants.
Why am I still there? The food is still cheaper and better than Key Food.
I regret Sciatica’s Kafkaesque treatment from the Powers at the co-op. Just think, however, if instead of offering his/her highly-conditional services, he/she had just taken a sick leave, which no one at the co-op would have begrudged? New mothers and fathers, for example, get 6-9 months leave from work.
Is Sciatica’s experience typical? I don’t think so. I’ve found people helpful and friendly, unless they are stressed out. On my Saturday work shift I see a consistent crew of people whom I’m glad to see and run into at other times shopping or around the neighborhood. Being a co-op involves getting to know people. It might even require one to learn some rules, because, guess what, this is not a store! It’s not even “New York’s most annoying store” (so named by New York’s most annoying magazine). As in other situations, one’s good intentions don’t trump understanding and communication.
As for D. Meltzer’s indictments (has the co-op really gone from a “benign anarchy to a fascistic dictatorship”?), I ask you, friend, would you, for instance, like to share a long car drive with him? Would the world be better if D. Meltzer had his hand on the wheel?
The co-op ain’t a communist, fascist, capitalist, fast-foodist, nudist, or yoga-ist hideout. It is all those things but more than any single one of them. It contains multitudes. Some of them are annoying, but look in the mirror, friend and ask, am I not annoying to someone even now as I put in my two cents?
Dear Robert T,
It has been a few years since the episode I described occurred. The Park Slope Food Coop has pretty much exited my consciousness. I am perfectly happy buying my food at Key Food with the occasional trip to Fairway in Red Hook.
I don’t begrudge the PS FC, and its foibles which are the inevitable consequence of its ambitions, complex and fragile at once. You are right that no human institution is perfect and to expect that from the Food Coop is simply not realistic.
Of course, I am also thrilled not to be a part of it, of the atmosphere which is little more than petty bourgeois pretense wrapped around fashionable causes. Remember, the Food Coop is about its members buying luxury food for themselves, not saving the world.
There are plenty of really troubling issues about the Food Coop, not the least of which is that its structure, in which most of the jobs are carried out by members, means there are no union jobs.
In that respect I find Key Food frankly more progressive.
Fairway, in the meantime, has provided Red Hook with a few dozen union jobs, which of course would never have happened had a Park Slope Food Coop implanted itself there instead.
I was recently reminded of the Food Coop, however, when I was at a friend’s home here in Park Slope. The friend offered her son a package of organic chocolate milk. He took one look at the package and responded “Yuk!”
The mother asked him what was wrong. “I hate that stuff,” her son explained. “I want Nestle. Nestle is much better.”
So much for another “bien pensant” cause…