Show HN: Searchable directory of 22k+ products from worker-owned co-ops

A lot of co-op talk around this thread, if anyone else has worked in / founded co-ops, I would love to chat, email in my profile. I founded one about 5 years ago and have been kinda shooting from the hip, would love to trade ideas.

Depending on the security of the sites you link to you might be able to show them locally in an iframe so users are only redirected if absolutely necessary and you can give an easy way back to search results/landing page

> I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.

You have an illusion of choice right now between sesame or non sesame bread through the low-resolution "voting" mechanism of the market, which doesn't actually consider your desires when counting votes, merely the profitability between your desires and a supplier's margin. If you like sesame, but if it's not profitable enough, too bad, no sesame for you. "They can charge more," "someone will fill the niche," yes we've been told that about capitalism for the last century, yet it's never been true, so I guess it was a lie. Think of all the products people want that we just can't get anymore because some big org decided we can't have it, or better yet, think of how nearly monopolized industries have leveraged their power to move markets towards more profitable directions. Clothes - big, baggy, unicolor blobs. Phones - black squares.

It's not only more ethical for breadmakers to he democratic, it's simply more efficient in terms of delivering what the people want and need. Markets are a low resolution, exploitable mechanism that can lead to contrary incentives. Better to just cast a vote.

By the way I would add that co-ops are more ethical because if it's set up correctly, nobody is profiting from your labor more than yourself. In a traditional org, the vast majority of your productive profit is captured and used in a way you have no say - lately mostly to line the pockets of shareholders and a captured boys club of nepo MBA types that often don't even have that much experience in your industry. In a co-op, you the worker decide what happens with the profit margin on top of your labor. You can use it to have more money for yourself (and your coworkers), or you can invest it more intelligently in the business than an exec thousands of miles away in the private jet your profit margin pays for. This also works out better for your customers and users.

Are you saying that products outside this directory are from people who you don't consider human beings ?

I already expressed why I think that more democracy makes workplaces more ethical immediately after where I said that I think so. If you'd like me to expand on this: governments and large companies are more alike than you think. Both of them are huge power structures that control lots of people. And both are quite powerful - your job can have as much of an impact on your life as the government you live under. If unchecked, both devolve into a hierarchical tug-of-war between the interests of its higher and lower rungs. Democracy works against this to ideally create a more equalized power structure.

Now that I established these parallels, my question to you is - why do we as a society treat democracy as sacred and essential in one type of hierarchy but not another? Why don't any of your concerns apply to your government? For instance, would you live in a dictatorship if you got to avoid the difficult and annoying chores of going out to vote, informing yourself politically or listening to politicians endlessly bicker about things?

Your examples seem to just boil down to absurdism. They don't indicate what is so wrong with people voting on things in a company, they're just exaggerations to make the idea seem inherently ridiculous. Bakeries don't spend days arguing about whether they need to offer one of the most popular product variants for sale, and if someone did, this would in no way impede the customer's ability to just buy a loaf of bread thanks. But something like a tech co-op will spend time arguing about which risky investments, future moves and needed sacrifices they're willing to make, walking away from it knowing that this is what they agree is best for everyone. Which frankly seems a lot better than far-upper management decreeing that everyone must now do XYZ even if their only intention is to pump company valuations short-term without any regard for future stability. The fact that co-ops tend to be more stable seems to agree with that.