The Happy Tutor has an inspiring essay over at Wealth Bondage. it started me thinking about how important Coops could be to The Change. It’s an existing business structure and relatively easy to set up.
Many people assume that Coops are just small-time natural food stores, but there are also producer coops (like Land-O-Lakes and Cabot). Even in the food sector, my Coop has five locations, 350 employees, and does $46MM a year in sales – this in a population density of ~50K. I’m currently researching how a producer coop would work for software engineers and software products. (Pointers welcome!) Coops are locally-owned, democratic (one member/one vote) and community-oriented.
July 19, 2003