Jim Kenyon's Column About Lyme Road and Gasoline
04/24/2008 - 10:38 am
This is my problem with columnists in general – in the short space alloted to cover a topic, it’s impossible to present the trade-offs involved with decisions. In a vacuum, sure, let’s have it all. In reality, everyone has to make decisions. Whether Jim’s writing about the Coop is more constrained by the available column inches or by a narcissistic love of controversy, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
04/24/2008 - 11:10 am
If you ask the editors of the Valley News (which I have, ‘cause I know and respect them) about Jim Kenyon’s column, the defend it by pointing out their requirement that Kenyon actually go out and report stuff, as opposed to just sitting at his computer pontificating. That’s great as far as it goes, and I agree it makes Jim Kenyon’s column both more interesting and more credible. But his idea of reporting seems to be: Start with a premise (e.g., the end of the gas pumps at Lyme Road proves the Co-op is indifferent to the members it claims to serve), and then run around and gather quotes that advance the premise, ignoring all countervailing evidence. So the credibility he gains is ill-gotten, in my view. I was a fulltime journalist for ten years, so I know all the tricks. He doesn’t tell you how many hours he spent in the parking lot of the shuttered Lyme Road store until he found someone who pulled in, looking for gas.
04/24/2008 - 11:20 am
Objectivity is dead. The sooner journalism realizes their value is contextualizing the gray areas, rather than spotlighting the polarizations, the sooner they have a chance of survival. Luckily for them there’s another decade or two of slow entropy before the “adults who have never read a physical newspaper” take over. (Luckily, that is, if you like being in an industry undergoing a slow death.)
04/24/2008 - 1:39 pm
I have quite a well of affection for the Valley News. It comes from having lived in a more populated part of northern New England that is saddled with a far inferior LDN (local daily newspaper). (I am talking about a certain metropolis with an ocean view and a Class AA minor league baseball team. Their LDN is now for sale, by the way.) But it does seem that daily newspapers in general are in a death spiral. I propose to replace them with reader-owned, cooperatively organized web-based news portals — probably looking something like what salon.com looks like today.
News — by which I mean thoughtful local, regional, national and international journalism, written by people with ethics and institutional memory — is a lot like the unavailable citrus fruit that originally led to the creation of the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society. They’re vital consumer commodities that the investor-owned economy has failed to deliver, thus creating the perfect co-opportunity. What would be worse — scurvy, or a similar wasting of our democracy itself through lack of information?
Moreover, if the readers own their source of news, the agent-principal relationships line up perfectly when some newsmaker is being interviewed. Now, although journalists claim to be representing their readers when they’re out reporting, in reality their job is to enrich the owners of their newspaper or TV station or whatever.
One idea is to have the newsletters of our food co-ops evolve in this direction. Just a thought . . . .
Don K.
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Jim Kenyon's Column About Lyme Road and Gasoline
[This reprises a post I previously filed as “anonymous” under the “welcome” thread. Now that I know how to start new topics I thought I would use that capability to make this message more visible.]
Fellow Cooperators:
Jim Kenyon does not understand the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society.
When the Valley News columnist wrote about the Co-op last year, he chose to draw every sinister inference he could about the organization’s motives and the integrity of its management and employees. In fact, there could not be a more principled, ethical and dedicated corps of people than the folks associated with the Co-op.
This year, he makes a less sinister but much more fundamental error. I refer to his description of the Co-op as a “nonprofit organization,” in his April 20 column accusing the Co-op of “not considering [its] customers at all” because the new Co-op Community Market on Lyme Road will not feature gas pumps.
A consumer cooperative society is not a nonprofit organization. That designation is reserved for charities. In fact, the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society is no less a business than the conventional supermarkets with which it competes. The difference – the big difference – is that the supermarkets extract profits from our community and pay them to distant shareholders. The Co-op takes whatever wealth it generates – whether it’s financial gain or a more intangible form of good – and returns it to us, the people who shop there.
Since the Co-op is not a charity, it cannot ignore business realities – and it cannot avoid making tough financial decisions and rely on donations to make up the difference. This completely explains why the gas pumps are disappearing as the Co-op Community Market is rebuilt.
Misinterpreting the comments of our excellent communications director Allan Reetz, Jim Kenyon would have you believe that the Co-op simply decided it could make more money on fancy imported coffee at Lyme Road than on gasoline. The reality is that plans for the new store originally included gas pumps, but in the end they simply added too much to the project’s budget to make them worthwhile. The Co-op therefore opted to focus on what the Co-op does really, really well – sell great food and deliver excellent customer service in the process.
I concede that management could have decided to keep the gas pumps and save money by making the building an undistinguished, rinky-dink structure of the sort that is depressingly familiar along the Route 12A shopping strip. Your Board of Directors has explicitly told management, in a formal policy, that this is not the way we want the Co-op to build.
So, the Co-op has commissioned a new building – our first since the construction of the flagship Hanover store in the early 1960s – that will not simply embody “green design” principles. It will prove that green principles can lead to beautiful architecture — a retail space that will make the Lyme Road Co-op a truly inviting place, as opposed to a place to visit reluctantly and as quickly as possible. This appealing, contemporary structure will anchor Dresden Village, which in essence is a second downtown that planners envision for the district between the two traffic circles on Lyme Road.
Jim Kenyon ridicules that whole planning concept, and he pines for the former gas-station that he found endearingly “cramped and grungy.” He might have a point if the Co-op had managed to buy and then bulldoze Dan and Whit’s. Beyond that, I will leave to others the task of deconstructing the columnist’s aversion to anything in the Upper Valley that smacks of grandeur and excellence.
On one point, Jim Kenyon is absolutely right. The end of the gas pumps on Lyme Road will disappoint and perhaps even inconvenience some folks who were using them. I wish the Co-op never had to disappoint anyone, and never had to make difficult choices based on finite resources and business realities. But I am confident that our members, other than Jim Kenyon, understand their Co-op and its purposes. In any event, I hope folks will come to our annual meeting on April 27 to talk about it.
Cordially,
Don Kreis
P.S. Yes, I am THAT Don Kreis, president of the Co-op’s Board of Directors. I am very excited about this new forum, and I hope to use it often to be in dialogue with other members about our cooperative. Please keep in mind, though, that this is an informal conversation. The views I express here are my own, as a member of the Co-op, and don’t necessarily reflect the official views of the Board. I’m hoping that other Board members will be among those sharing opinions here.