I am beginning to think it may be time to end one of my longest relationships. It’s been eleven years of joy and sorrow and laughter and tears and amazing produce, but I’m finally ready to bail on the Park Slope Food Coop.
When my wife and I first arrived in Brooklyn in 2002, we moved into a spare room in our friend’s huge 1-family brownstone on the east side of Prospect Park — the side opposite from the fully gentrified, Disneyland Main Street U.S.A. known as Park Slope. Following the lead of our friends/landlords (friendlords?), who’d joined the Coop (not Co-op, even though spelling it the other way makes you think coop rhymes with poop) when they lived in Park Slope and remained devoted members even from the wrong side of the park. When we moved in, they didn’t tell us we HAD to join the Coop, but it was strongly suggested that living in a Coop household and eating Coop food without contributing to the Coop as working members would drag all of us into a moral gray area that not all of us would be comfortable with. Our friendlords had never led us astray before, the produce we’d been eating from their kitchen was indeed delightful, and we were eager to be good roommates because they were giving us a great deal to live there, so we agreed to join up.
We took the tour and sat for the orientation lecture, where we got the hard sell: The Coop offers amazing, mindblowingly fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as an assortment of free-range, grass-fed, hormone-free, yoga-practicing meats and a variety of off-brand, all-organic dry goods, at prices an average of 30% cheaper than the supermarket. How are they able to accomplish this? That right there is the greatest trick the devil ever pulled — if the devil was committed to social justice and canvas pants.
Every member of the Park Slope Food Coop is required to work a two-hour forty-five-minute “workslot” once every four weeks, and except for a handful of paid full-time staff, Coop members make up the Coop’s entire labor pool. This cleverly eliminates the single biggest piece of overhead at regular supermarkets — the payroll — and allows the Coop to pass the savings on to the members. So when you join the Coop, you’re literally working for food (at reduced prices), like a bum with a cardboard sign (except slightly less dignified).
Following the lead of our friendlords, I joined the Shopping Squad, which is the people who work on the shopping floor stocking the shelves, manning the security desk at the front door and scanning people’s member ID’s, cashiering, and checkout, which was the job I did. The first several years we were at the coop, checkout and cashier were rigidly firewalled from each other: first I’d scan and weigh all your food, you’d bag it up, and then you’d take your bill over to the cashier to pay it. This was supposedly to prevent theft, but I have no idea how it would have accomplished that. In effect, all it did was create another line for people to wait in before they could get out the door. And the Coop was cash-only, so every third time I shopped I’d go $5 over budget and then have to leave my full cart so I could go to an ATM around the corner. Eventually all the checkout stations were outfitted with debit card readers, but not before a years-long debate over whether it was consistent with the Coop’s principles to support the debt industry by accepting plastic as payment. (The hard-won compromise was to accept debit cards only — credit cards remain verboten at the Coop, which is the reason the credit card industry is now on its knees.)
For those of you who’ve never been to the Park Slope Food Coop, picture the organic section of your local supermarket. You know, the 10×20 foot corner where they hide all the Amy’s Organic frozen pizzas, the Annie’s Organic mac and cheese, and everything with Paul Newman’s face on it. Take that 10×20 square, make it 4% bigger with double the inventory, triple the shoppers, and ten thousand million times the righteous hippie indignation, and you’ve got the Park Slope Food Coop.
The first shift I worked as a member of the Coop, my friendlord (who had assumed the role of Squad Leader) got into a shouting argument with a shopper because she had tried to help the shopper pack her groceries, which for some reason the shopper took great umbrage to. And this was but the amuse-bouche for the hundreds of arguments and hostilities I would witness at the coop over the next 12 years.
My wife once saw a woman tell a Hasidic lady who was spacing out with her phone in the middle of the aisle that she was blocking everyone’s way, and the Hasidic lady started shouting, called her anti-Semitic, and the woman replied, “I’m Jewish!”
There used to be a very old woman who seemed to drive her Rascal scooter to the Coop every day to shop for just a day’s worth of groceries — maybe that was all she could carry on the Rascal, or maybe she figured each meal might be her last. (She was really, really, old is what I’m saying.) Since she was confined to the Rascal, she couldn’t reach much of anything, so she’d ask whoever was closest in her gentle, shaky, Katharine Hepburn voice, “Dear brother, could you hand me a green pepper?” This would usually be quickly followed by the same little old lady angrily scowling, “I WANTED NON-ORGANIC! DO I LOOK LIKE A ROCKEFELLER?” She must have died, because I haven’t seen her in a couple of years.
I bought a newfangled invention that turns tap water into seltzer at the Coop several years ago, called a SodaStream. Seemed like a great idea, considering we were drinking a case (twelve 1-liter bottles) a week: I wouldn’t have to haul 40 lbs of water home, and I wouldn’t have to put all that plastic in the recycling. But when it turned out last year that SodaStream has a factory in the disputed part of Israel/Palestine, there was a loud faction in the Coop that wanted to boycott the machines, to the point of picketing out front, which is the reason Israel has halted all of its West Bank settlements.
When you take a bunch of dead-serious, politically correct treehuggers and put them in a severely overcrowded space, trying to navigate half-sized shopping aisles with full-size shopping carts, it really doesn’t matter how politically like-minded you are — all they know is you are between them and the last thing of tea-tree oil, and therefore no better than an AIPAC speaker. Add to that the fact that once you’ve managed to fill your cart, you have to wait in a line that more often than not stretches from the front of the place to the back, then winds to the front again and then back to the back, with the wait to check out sometimes lasting 45 minutes to an hour, and you get a customer base that arrives loaded for bear, ready to fight whether it’s really warranted or not. Aside from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I can’t think of another place where so many people are so quick to jump down each other’s throats.
Further slowing everything down is the fact that, since everyone does their jobs for only 2.75 hours a month, no one is very good at them. If Malcolm Gladwell is correct that it takes 10,000 hours to get good at something, it would take a Coop worker 400 years to master the art of checkout. I remember one time a fellow member asked me where to find something and I didn’t know, and he said, “Well, don’t you work here?” I could only reply, “Don’t you?”
As you can see, if time is money, our savings at the Coop are negligible.
It doesn’t seem like a lot to work 2.75 hours a month, but it is very easy to fall behind, especially if you make the mistake we made, which is to schedule your monthly workslot during the weekend. As it turns out, unexpected fun things to do come up on the weekend ALL THE TIME and when they do, weighed against the grave responsibility of scanning bar codes on the full rainbow of Annie’s Organic products, weighing the produce (and getting condescendingly clucked at if your are unable to identify the difference between snow peas and snap peas), and staring at the clock like a sixth-grader in detention, the fun things tend to win out. (That’s if you remember your shift in the first place, which is iffy at best.)
If you miss a shift, you have to make that shift up sometime before your next scheduled shift, which is reasonable, but you also have to do an additional shift, a penalty shift, which is solely punitive, the incentive to keep you from falling behind. Before we were parents, when I was bartending four nights a week and had my days free and my wife was a real estate agent and had a flexible schedule, we grumbled about this but went along with it. With the advent of smartphones, several years ago, I got in the habit of entering all my shifts in my phone so I wouldn’t forget them, and I was pretty good (but far from perfect) about keeping up.
But a couple of years ago, my wife took on the time- and soul-sucking job of New York City schoolteacher, and found herself swamped 20 hours a day (the other four are for sleeping) with a massive workload of preparing lesson plans and grading papers and mailing letters to parents and on and on and on, so every time her shift came up she would call and pretend to be sick, and then forget about the makeup and incur another makeup, then repeat the cycle, etcetera etcetera.
If one person in your household is suspended from shopping, everyone in your household is suspended — we can’t have a person who hasn’t lived up to their Coop responsibilities benefitting from someone who has — so I was put in the awkward position of having to constantly remind my poor overworked, sleep-deprived wife that she needed to do her makeup shifts and get right with the Coop. Invariably, she would make a noise and say that with her insane workload, she couldn’t possibly do a makeup shift. Technically, if I wanted to go in and do her makeup shifts I could have gotten us out of hock, but as Meat Loaf once sang, “I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That).”
Despite the fact that she perpetually owed at least one or two makeups but never did them, she somehow managed to never get us actually you-can’t-shop suspended, I guess because no one noticed that she called in sick every month (if you call and tell them you’re not coming, you can avoid the punitive second makeup shift) and never did her makeups so they kept extending her “grace period” where we could continue shopping.
But her luck did eventually run out, and when she realized she was about to incur yet another makeup shift that she’d never go in and do — at least not as long as she remains an NYC public schoolteacher — she called the Coop and put our household on a three-month leave, so we don’t have to work but we can’t shop either.
At first I was a little pissed about this, because she didn’t ask me before she did it, she just put us on leave. I do pretty much all the shopping in our house, because of the aforementioned crushing workload Jen is trapped under, and for all its annoyances I had gotten shopping at the Coop down to a science. I figured out the best time to go to avoid crowds of angry hippies and even stand a chance of parking less than a block away (Tuesday night at 9pm), the best way to avoid traffic in the aisles (park the cart and use it as a home base for smaller sorties for individual items), and became so familiar with where all our regular purchases could be found that I could get the whole ordeal over with in about an hour.
Once it sunk in that I couldn’t shop there anymore, I decided to go to Fairway, the ginormous supermarket down in Red Hook, which recently re-opened after being flooded by Hurricane Sandy. I continued my Coop strategy of shopping at 9 on a weeknight to avoid crowds, and it worked out great, there was nobody there. But I soon realized how completely brainwashed I’d become by the Coop over the last 12 years, because my brain almost totally shut down, overwhelmed by the freedom of choice — as opposed to the Coop, which limits its inventory to non-GMO, organic, foods in sustainable (usually green or brown) packaging.
You mean there’s more than one brand of American cheese? Ten kinds of cornflakes? Five hundred kinds of coffee? I don’t have to go to a butcher to get some pork sausage? Not all the fish is frozen? I don’t have to park a block away? They have their own parking lot? I CAN SEE THE STATUE OF LIBERTY FROM SAID PARKING LOT?
I can check out and pay for my food at the same time? I don’t have to pay a nickel for a plastic bag to put it in? And I can pay with a credit card if I want to? And I can get Toll House cookie dough like the walking garbage dump I’ve always secretly been?
I haven’t done a specific item-by-item price comparison of the two places, but I buy pretty much the same stuff week to week and I haven’t had any particular sticker shock since I’ve been shopping at Fairway. If I’m spending more, it’s not so much more that I’ve noticed. I think whatever savings come from not having a payroll are canceled out by only offering organic food, which tends to be a lot more expensive. The best part is, I don’t have to nag my wife to work shifts she has neither the time nor inclination to work, and I don’t have to work them either.
The moment she told me we were on three-month leave, I knew we would never darken the Coop’s door again. It’s like when your girlfriend tells you she wants a three-month break. You’re not getting back together. I’ve tasted freedom, and it tastes like Toll House cookies, and I’m not going back.
Are there things I’ll miss about the Coop?
*thinking…..*
*still thinking….*
I was going to say the Honeycrisp apples, but they’ve been pretty lousy this year, riddled with wormholes and huge wet brown bruises. So other than the comedy of supposedly enlightened, progressive yoga types passive-aggressively sighing at each other if not outright shouting in each other’s faces over such things as shopping from the line, not putting your cart back after you’ve checked out, or taking the last persimmon, this is feeling like a win-win. And, if I ever start to miss the Coop’s paternalism, I can just go to Fairway’s candy aisle, and think for myself.
