81–90 of 181 posts
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Yep you know the one. It's on the other side of the street from the barber shop and knicknack place the barber's wife owns. the one with those welded metal sculptures of people made from forks and scrap iron and stuff. You from around the area?
La crosse area, love going down to viroqua during this time of year though.
Definitely avoid though the big name giant ones that claim to be a "CSA" but are a giant national org
If you have not checked out a real CSA in your area I highly recommend it (Community Supported Agriculture) - its basically the convenience of a farmers market without you needing to dedicate the time to it. Plus you are getting the absolute freshest produce from a local farm directly. Definitely avoid though the big name giant ones that claim to be a "CSA" but are a giant national org
Can anyone shed more light on why it takes 7-10 years to get to an actual store? In my head you’d start signing up suppliers / farmers, find a suitable place to rent, get some more funding, build out the store, hire, and start it up. What makes it slower than other businesses?
Coops often find it harder to borrow and they cannot sell equity. This makes the every "get some funding" step harder than it sounds. Going over the list I see a lot of people-organizing and community-outreach efforts. These are definitely going to be more time-intensive than setting up an LLC owned by a single person and running with that.
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Seattle area has the nations largest and oldest grocery co-op - https://www.pccmarkets.com . 16 stores and generally doing well. The answer to how to keep it going is to run it like a grocery chain with experienced leaders and good board governance. In my experience a lot of the smaller coops I've seen have a problem separating the ideology from the need to run a business, grocery is notoriously low margin so a littl…
pccmarket prices are sooo insanely expensive. I wonder who can afford to shop there :-/.
On a more serious note, the Seattle Median Income is $120,907 for 2022, see page 4: https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/Housing/Proper...
This seems to be in the Boston, Mass., area. Some related local background is that there was the Harvest Co-op chain until a few years ago: https://www.boston.com/food/food/2018/10/04/harvest-co-op-ma... There's also the Market Basket for-profit regional chain, where employees and customers successfully stood up against some family business maneuvers to force out the head, and it's once again generally well-regarded…
Vermont has a fairly successful Co-op in Burlington. https://www.citymarket.coop/
A co-op has a lot of positive externalities: better customer experience, better benefits, pay, and job satisfaction for the employees than at non-co-op grocery stores, the community it fosters, etc. If these things matter to you, they can outweigh the premium the co-op has to charge to provide them.
I worked in the Lexington Co-op in Buffalo back in the 90s. It was a great job despite the meager pay and benefits (at the time) because I didn't feel like I was the lackey of the customers or my bosses but their friend and neighbor. I was in graduate school, which was depressing and alienating. I found the co-op a far nicer place to live my life than academia. It's been many years, but it's still one of the best jobs I've had. I met my wife there. My pay is better now, but I still shop at co-ops when I can.
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Given that Harvest shut down "after years of financial instability", what's the strategy for this new co-op to survive? If you can't run a successful co-op in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where can you?
Seattle area has the nations largest and oldest grocery co-op - https://www.pccmarkets.com . 16 stores and generally doing well. The answer to how to keep it going is to run it like a grocery chain with experienced leaders and good board governance. In my experience a lot of the smaller coops I've seen have a problem separating the ideology from the need to run a business, grocery is notoriously low margin so a littl…
PCC is also known to treat employees relatively poorly, just like grocery chains. There are also complaints about an "old boys" culture, familiar to anyone that worked retail long-term.
In the Seattle area, there are better coops like Central Co-op, with similar prices and better worker treatment (since all employees are owners in addition to opt-in shoppers)
At this point, PCC is just Whole Foods with higher prices...
If you have not checked out a real CSA in your area I highly recommend it (Community Supported Agriculture) - its basically the convenience of a farmers market without you needing to dedicate the time to it. Plus you are getting the absolute freshest produce from a local farm directly. Definitely avoid though the big name giant ones that claim to be a "CSA" but are a giant national org
I love the concept of a CSA. We've tried it a few times. It's such a great idea and I want these things to succeed. For us, we canceled after a few weeks each time because the ones we joined were all setup similarly: once every week or so, you get a bag of food, whatever's in season. That leaves us having to figure out what to do with all this stuff we don't normally cook and don't have recipes for, and that the kids…