r/cooperatives

A campaign starting as a joke on instagram reels 10hrs ago has reached $10m pledged to attempt to buy spirit airlines and turning it into a co-op

I’m looking at buying my first apartment in a NYC co-op and honestly the deeper I go the more I realize how much operational stuff is happening behind the scenes in these buildings

before this I kinda assumed it was mostly just monthly maintenance fees and occasional meetings, but now I keep hearing about compliance, vendors, heating issues, insurance headaches, inspections, etc..

For people that have lived in or served on coop boards for a while, what ends up being the biggest recurring challenge/headache for most?

Anyone here managed to stay living with someone you had a conflict with and it was okay? How did you manage it? Got any tips for me?

There was a conflict in my house a few months ago and although we followed the procedure as best we could (conflict is messy right? It’s rarely a cut and dried thing between two people)…

The “primary” conflict was resolved but there ended up being an un-named, much subtler conflict between me and someone else who fuelled the primary conflict.

I’ve tried to sort things out with her but it hasn’t worked. I feel so terrible seeing her every day and being reminded of it all. We’re lucky enough to have two houses in my co-op so I’m moving in to the other one to get away from her, but the two houses are still very intertwined and I’m worried it won’t be enough. It’s really affecting my mental health.

I don’t know how to keep living with her.
wondering if anyone has any advice or has been through similar situations?

Who ever heard of such a thing? But, we need more people who have visited intentional communities to leave reviews of them in relevant places. Or, any place. This will stop dysfunctional communities from wasting people's time and exploiting their labor.

Riverwest Co-op and Outpost serve as examples of how food co-ops are faring today.

Hey everyone, we've made a community for those interested in the "Lets Buy Spirit Air" movement. r/letsbuyspiritair. Apologies to the mods if they aren't fans of advertising another community, but I feel its related and relevant.

Currently, most discussion i see on the topic is limited to comments sections of Instagram, TikTok, or one-off posts in other communities. I think it's important for the broader mass of supporters to have a place to discuss the topic, rather than being limited to the comment section of Hunter Peterson's Instagram reels, whenever he makes them.

The community is meant to be a place for those who support, have pledged, or are simply interested in the movement to discuss developments, ideas, ask questions, or provide insight. After all, organizing and keeping those in the lead accountable is the next step, after the wave of public fervor. Many of pledged, here is a place to learn and discuss things more in depth!

So I want to make a general pitch to the universe for a big bulk store grocery chain that focuses on using reusable packing. The concept is 'we-pack' - so, unlike most bulk stores today, you don't fill the containers, the store does.

Idea is a very different experience compared to any other grocery store - instead of walking down aisle after aisle of products, it would probably be focused around a smaller showroom. Maybe you get a tablet to place your order, then you walk around little product displays. There is a cereal section, maybe it has little wax mock-ups of the different cereals, with nutritional information write ups, you key in the ones you want, in the package sizes. When you are done, you pay - possibly spending some time in a waiting area while everything is being filled - then pick up your packages and go.

There are some bulk stores out there, or stores that focus on reusable packaging. But they tend to be small, not really a place to get most or all of your food. I think a lot of people use plastic bags at bulk stores, which doesn't help reduce packaging so much.

What I am visualizing would probably have to be fairly big to work. Generally the nature of grocery retail is huge chains operating on small profit margins. Some small grocers do survive but it is difficult, especially if they want to have the lowest prices.

Being big would help get a reasonable price on the containers as well. Maybe to start some plastic, there's glass, but optimally the goal might be something like stainless steel. Plastic lids still maybe. I don't have solid numbers, but a 5 litre stainless steel container to hold cereal or flour etc might cost say $10 to produce. So maybe the store charges a $10 deposit, which does add up for all your groceries. Could be people are willing to pay a deposit if they know they can get that money back, could be you have to charge a cheaper deposit and accept the loss if some go missing.

The store would wash the containers in-house. Much simpler and more sanitary doing it that way. So you would be getting new containers every time you went there.

Packing is fairly cheap, but over the long run it would probably save people money. Again I don't know, but a cereal box and bag might cost say .25 in packaging. So you have to use that steel container 40 times before it is cheaper. But optimally those containers are getting used thousands of times. Also the reason why packaging is so cheap is because the environmental damages it does often aren't costed in, so while you don't 'save' on cheaper cereal there, we do collectively 'save'. Overall I've heard packaging is about 7% of the price of things, so there is potential to save a few % on your grocery bill.

Most products already come in packaging, so it would need to get around that system. So the store would have to make special arrangements with the cereal makers etc, or better still manufacture their own cereal. The manufacturer would package directly into big bulk-optimized containers, which would be shipped directly to the stores, and dispense directly into the customer's stainless steel containers. The we-pack model with a smaller showroom could cut down on store size as well - grocery stores are really big places on valuable land.

To me that seems like a solid business model. With the qualifier that it would only really work if it was big - minimum starting investment of hundreds of millions, dozens of stores to start? Do people see flaws in the model? Optimally be nice to do it as a consumer owned cooperative. I think there's huge untapped potential for crowd funding - everybody uses groceries, if 10% of the US population chipped in $10 each that would be almost $350 million in seed capital. Not that I see raising $350 million as particularly realistic..

Lots of talk of public groceries stores these days, Avi Lewis, Zohran Mamdani, if you are going to go to the effort of doing that, why not try to cut down on packaging as well? If it operated at cost and owned a lot of its own manufacturing and shipping, owned it's own land even, it could offer groceries at maybe 10-15+% less (???) than current grocery prices - and that's a real 10% less, not like when they bump up the prices then put it at a discount, 10% less than what you are actually spending now. Aside from not generating a mountain of packaging every day.

I'd even be happy if free market capitalism went ahead and did this for us. Any masters of industry reading? If I was at the helm of some mega-corporation I'd feel some social responsibility towards these things. A major retailer could roll out a system like this easily enough, in the grand scheme of things - certainly it would be a big expense, possibly even more risk than the risk:return equation would justify. Although seems definitely possible that they could increase their profits with a strategy like this. Environmentalism is a strong and growing movement, you'd be well positioned if there do start being more taxes on environmental damage, and things start costing their true cost.

 

Has anyone every thought about starting/know of a health captive for cooperatives?

I'm trying to get out of the health insurance market and still meet federal regulations and know Third Party Administrators can run captive health insurnaces. I currently have one for solopreneurs but since starting our cooperative there is this really annoying gap of having 10 people to get group rate discounts on health insurance through the private market.

Plus the idea of a cooperatively owned health captive sounds really nice too.

Hello all, first time posting here. My workplace is in the process of transitioning into a worker cooperative. We get paid only a bit above minimum wage but they are expecting us to each contribute $500 as buy in for the cooperative. Is this usual? I feel that I cannot afford to participate because I am not making enough in the first place and struggling to make ends meet.

A pal and I are opening a new worker's co-op tattoo studio in Glasgow this month! We're really excited about it but also both completely new to this and want to make sure we get things right. Curious about:

• Does anyone have experience with consortium co-ops and being self-employed while co-managing a space? This feels like the most natural model for tattooers as we're mostly self-employed and have our own practices to begin with, but it feels a bit tricky to get the balance right
• We want to bring new members into the space sometime soon, but we're very aware the two of us are already friends and have an established dynamic and ideas about the space! Has anyone grown from a very small co-op and managed to keep things feeling genuinely equal? Would love any tips on this!

Also I hope this is OK, but if you're in the UK and want to support, we have a crowdfunder with vouchers, prints, etc to help us build up the space :)

Note: I live in India.

i have been an leftist for a while and was wondering where i could possibly study co-ops/coop econ.

national or international