The Berkeley Co-op: Democratic, Up to a Point

The New Republic, December 1, 1972

Berkeley, California

THE BOARD of directors of Safeway has on it J.G. Bos­well II, one of Califor­nia’s biggest growers, two bank chairmen and a host of others concerned with max­imi­zing profit and promoting large-scale agriculture.  The unpaid directors of the Consumers Cooperative of Berkeley include a teacher, a nutritionist, a lawyer, and a flooring contractor whose concern is to serve the con­sumers who elect them.  This difference in leadership objectives makes a difference in the way stores are run.

The first thing that strikes a shopper entering a Co‑op supermarket is a feeling that the store is on his side.  Posters and displays help him select the best nutri­tion­al and dollar values, not lure him into impulse buying.  Charts along each aisle list the per unit prices of com­parable products and brands; dating codes are clearly marked and explained_; warnings are posted next to products deemed un­worthy (“Tang may be handy when camping—we do not recommend it for regular use”).­  There is a free community bulletin board, a kid­die koral where mothers may leave their toddlers in good hands, and a suggestion box that gets results.

If the shopper looks closely, he will notice a relative­ly good ethnic balance among employees (although women are underrepresented) and a price structure that is, according to a survey by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, about one percent high­er than Safeway’s but lower than most other chains’ and grocery stores’.  It is, in short, a pleasant place to shop, a place where one can be confident of quality and honest pri­ces.  If there are any ^–profits^– at the end of the year they are distributed to members in proportion to their patronage.

Yet the differences between the Co-op and Safeway are diminishing.  Partly this is because Safeway is be­ginning to imitate many of the Co-op’s pro-consumer poli­cies.  It is also an inevitable consequence of the Co­op’s own success.  Thirty-five years ago, when what is now the Consumers Cooperative of Berkeley began as a series of buying clubs and a service station, orga­nized by Finns and a Protestant study group, there was an esprit about the common enterprise that is now lacking.  The cooperative was more than a place for buying goods and saving money; it was a way for neighbors to get to know each other, as well as a movement with a sense of mission.  Today, it’s pretty hard to detect much missionary zeal in a $40-mil­lion-a-year business that, with 23 stores and gas stations, whole­saling affiliates and associated services, has taken on the trappings of a local conglomerate.  To the average Ber­keley resident the Co-op is just another large and impersonal insti­tu­tion.  He spends money there, but is otherwise uninvolved.

SOME OF THE younger people around Berkeley have, in consequence, established buy­ing networks called “food conspiracies. ^– Most of these are organized in a non-hier­ar­chical as well as non-profit manner.  Re­sponsibilities are shared and rotated; there are no dis­tinctions between management, employees and con­sumers.  Each week all participants in a “conspiracy” pool their food orders, and the members whose turns are up make the rounds of wholesalers and producers, buying in bulk and eliminating as many middlemen as possible.  The purchases are then distributed from a yard or garage.

The conspiracies often work well but there are in­herent weaknesses: personalities clash and members move or lose interest, making many of the networks as turbulent and ephemeral as the Co-op is steady and ever-growing.  And therein lies a dilemma that has haunted American cooperatives: is it possible to pros­per and at the same time retain the cooperative spirit?  Putting it conversely, can a cooperative which puts pri­macy on member participation and internal demo­cracy achieve stability and longe­vity?

The Consumers Cooperative of Berkeley has been grappling with this dilemma for years.  Its first concern has always been to survive as a business.  To survive it was necessary to compete with chain stores, which meant getting big enough to achieve economies of scale.  Getting big meant having to employ business techniques that hardly emanated from Rochdale.  Thus, in 1962, the Co-op decided to purchase Sid’s Stores, a local five-store chain, without consulting its member­ship.  Many members felt this was a violation of coop­erative principles; the board contended it had to act quickly and quietly or the opportunity would have been lost.  This year the board decided to expand into a low-income area of Oakland.  Some members argued that a cooperatively oriented membership base should have been established first, else the Co-op was little different from a chain store.  Co-op officials responded that it would take too long to build a membership base without an on-going store, and that opening the Oak­land branch was a practical way to help blacks.

With 60,000 member families in the San Francisco area, the Berkeley Co-op has met the challenge of get­ting big.  It has not been quite as successful in keeping a sense of togetherness.  Board meetings are lively but sparsely attended.  When a committee was recently cre­ated to discuss ways of getting members more involved in the Co-op, only one of the nine persons on the com­mittee showed up for the first meeting.  And when the Co-op nominating committee looked around this fall for candidates for the upcoming elections to the board, it could find only eight persons willing to serve.  Since the by-laws of the Co-op require at least nine candi­dates when there are six vacancies to be filled, the nominating committee had to plead in the Co-op news­paper for more contenders to step forward.  (Eight more eventually did.)

Several years ago, co-op leaders experimented with a Co-op Parliament and a Co-op Congress, neither of which turned out very well.  Under the present orga­nizational structure each store, or cooperative center, has an elected council of members which enjoys a very limited degree of autonomy.  Board members frequently pay homage to the idea of giving more power to the councils, but their preference for uniform poli­cies in­variably prevails.  Lately the Co-op has switched from newspaper advertising that emphasized low prices to radio spots that stress the Co-op’s institutional vir­tues—consumer ownership, patronage refunds, an elected board.  This appears to have helped boost sales, but not the participatory urge.

APATHY may be brought about by other things than bigness and impersonality; it may be a sign of general satisfaction, or a product of the TV age.  In any case, even without active member participation the Co-op management cannot help but respond to consumer in­terests, if only because the channels for member in­volve­ment remain available for use when needed, and because board members tend to be political liber­als.  It was prodding from members that persuaded the Co-op to open a natural food store, prohibit smoking and start a recycling center.  Encour­agement from the board has made the Co-op an active spokesman in Sacramento on consumer issues.  Occasionally the Co-op has even taken a position on non-consumer issues—it closed stores early one Moratorium day, and was probably the first supermarket chain in the country not to handle non-union grapes during the boycott.  Its patronage refund system allows members to donate to SNCC, CORE, UFWOC and other movement orga­nizations by purchasing on those organizations’ co-op number.

Robert Neptune, who has been associated with the Co-op management since 1937, has written that the success of cooperatives in America depends upon their, ability “to keep a good balance between the desire of the philosopher and the reformer and the operating re­quirements of the businessman.”  This seems as valid an obser­vation as any that can be drawn from the Ber­keley experience.

Cooperatives, like small farms and almost every other form of independent busi­ness, have fallen vic­tim to the mid-century dictum of expand or die.  Indeed, they now must start big if they are not to go under quickly.  Efforts to establish consu­mer cooperatives in New York, Baltimore, New Haven, San Francisco and other cities failed early in the game for lack of sufficient volume.  The food conspiracies go on, but they are limited to people with considerable time and energy to expend, and to undertakings in which the required expertise and capital investments are min­imal.

All this may mean that small, closely-knit coop­erative societies are a thing of the past, that non-profit, consumer-owned (and perhaps worker-owned) enter­prises must, under present conditions in America, function in ways not unlike their cor­porate counter­parts.  They can be democratic but only up to a point, and only in a representative, institutionalized way.

Second in a series on cooperatives that work.