The Co-op Food Stores

added 02/06/08

by Don Kreis, Board President

Paul Hazen, the affable president of the National Cooperative Business Association, looked at me like I was nuts when I suggested that a newspaper would be an excellent cooperative enterprise. The forum was a very public one – Hazen had just finished giving a speech and was taking questions from the floor – so, perhaps in a more intimate setting, with a bit longer to reflect, he would have warmed to the idea.

Or maybe not.

You, too, might think that is a screwball idea, the mere rantings of a recovering journalist whose first job was with the Associated Press—a cooperative. Or, you might conclude that a consumer cooperative serving as an aggregator of individual electric customers’ demand for energy is a delusional plan for getting such customers access to “green” energy produced by wind farms and other sustainable sources. Chalk that one up to a day job as a utility regulator. So, too, with the idea of a cooperative serving as your Internet provider and phone company.

My point is not to suggest that these ideas form any part of the future of the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society. To the contrary, our cooperative remains focused on its core grocery business. The above musings are offered as a form of inspiration, because it is time for all of us, the 16,000 or so households who comprise the cooperative’s active membership, to use our imaginations. Our legendary forbears, who started the Co-op because they otherwise couldn’t get citrus fruit in Hanover, didn’t sink back into their easy chairs once they could start peeling their grapefruit. Likewise, we who love the Co-op Food Stores as they are should not be complacent about what they could be.

Chiseled into the entablature of our cooperative, metaphorically speaking, is this statement of the ends your Board hopes the Co-op will achieve at the global level: “cooperative commerce for the greater good of our members and the community.” So, as I wander the Upper Valley, I have become fond of asking Co-op members what sort of cooperative commerce they’d like to see in the decades ahead.

In receiving responses, I discover that everyone wants to be a merchandiser. Just as Red Sox fans enjoy second-guessing Theo Epstein’s trades or Terry Francona’s managerial decisions, everyone seems to have an opinion about what should be on the shelves. This is by no means unwelcome member input—the Co-op staff welcome your thoughts and have designed a customer comment form for this very purpose—but I invite you to join the Board in trying to think bigger thoughts about the cooperative as well.

Are you on the Board of a local non-profit? Tell us how the Co-op, and cooperative commerce in general, might help your organization achieve its mission. Are you certain that the march of cooperative progress leads from Hanover and Lebanon through your town? Tell us why. Have a vision for how our food supply and its distribution system can soar past mere sustainability and actually become environmentally regenerative? Share the vision.

And as for the vision of a cooperative formed by avid news readers? You may say I’m a dreamer, but, for the same reasons we enshrined freedom of the press in the First Amendment, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if we had journalists who truly were agents of their readers. Thanks for reading!