Long love the Coop


(The Venice-Ocean Park Food Cooperative closed its doors in October after 25 years of operation.)

By Eric Ahlberg

I loved those VOP coop parties with some local gang of peace musicians creating a groove. I met my ex-wife over a Coop Tofutti Machine and we soon created our own coop.



The most important action we can take is to listen. It's already so hard to reconcile the conflicting voices, sometimes you've worked so hard on something and then somebody comes along and tells you you are all wrong, righteous agendas with shaded facts, whose loaded agenda is next? Is anybody really right around here?

I ain't in it for the money.

I never believed I'd get better prices out of a Coop. Belonging to the Coop meant belonging to larger group of like minded activists and artists working for a more cooperative world.

Cooperation and Business.

Cooperation promises to free us from undesirable commercial manipulations, of our most precious sustenance; to free us from like toxic pesticides, GMOs, and junk food marketing. Tell it to the landlord, the DWP, the suppliers, and the investors. So many gave and so many took. Ross Moster agruably gave the most, his gentleness and resources sustaining the Coop for years.

Storefronts are expensive.

Monthly sales were $21,000 ($700 a day), minus rent and electric ($5,000), minus cost of goods, minus insurance, taxes, repairs, spoilage, debt and payroll ($2500).

Small businesses with more than 50 vendors are tough to manage. That’s approximately 50 percent overhead before you get any product.

Economically the coop never rose above a money pit. Many gave so generously to keep it going, the board and members were burnt out, and it was left to the workers to make it go. They hoped that the debt and high overhead could be overcome if the economic engine could be pumped up. Too often I would go in and ask for stuff I bought last week, and it would never get restocked. Debt gridlock? Over expectations for underpaid managers?

Some felt that VOP was more real than Cooportunity, like Cooportunity had lost it's soul in the profitable slickness it had become. VOP stayed funky Venice for sure, too funky I guess. Coop people from all over the world would stop in because Coops are generally good places to get plugged into the local alternative community.

It's curious to me that Vons, Ralphs, and Albertsons are all the same corporation now. Computerized retailing enhancing the tendency of Capital toward Monopoly, via rationalization of the back office.

Some who were involved want to set up a buying club. Nutrition Warehouse bought up most of the physical assets and is planning to setup a natural food store just a couple of block North of Brooks on Lincoln.

The Coop is dead, Cooperation lives on.

Posted: Sat - November 1, 2003 at 04:56 PM          

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