“flunking out” at the co-op

Posted: October 23rd, 2009 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Miconian At Large | Tags: Alana Joblin Ain, Park Slope Food Co-op | 8 Comments »

In an article that shows a disappointing lack of perspective and research, Alana Joblin Ain whines in today’s New York Times that at the Park Slope Food Co-op, of which I am a member, she isn’t given the respect that she’s due:

As I was checking out, I reached for my entrance receipt, which I had received at the front because I did not have my long-unused membership card. But I couldn’t find the receipt in my bag. I offered to give the checkout worker my member ID number to enter into the computer.

“No, I need the actual slip of paper,” he said.

But I would not have been allowed in the store without the entrance receipt, I reminded him.

“I can’t check you out,” he shrugged unhelpfully. “You can go back to the entrance worker and get a new receipt.”

I suppose there were reasons for the policy. But as I walked back to the entrance worker, I wondered if being treated like a delinquent was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yeah, there are reasons for the policy. How insipid that Ain wrote such a thing in the New York Times without bothering to find out what they are. Especially after having obviously interviewed the co-op’s general manager, Joe Holtz, for other parts of her article.

If cashiers didn’t ask for IDs or entrance receipts, then there would be no point to the entrance workers even being there. So why not get rid of them and let the cashiers be the ones to decide whether someone is eligible to shop? Because, without the entrance workers, people who were not allowed to shop (basically, non-members and suspended members) would wander into the store and take up their own time and other people’s space by loading up on groceries, only to find at checkout that they weren’t allowed to buy (at which time, of course, they would not be particularly motivated to put everything back where they found it).

Cashiers could assume that anyone who was already in the store had passed muster and should be allowed to shop. Except that isn’t true. Some people in the store are guests, and some are members owing a backlog of work before they can shop. Cashiers can get a transaction rolling with a member number, but they don’t have the tech at their stations to tell whether the person giving them the number is the person to whom the number belongs, or (I think) whether the person is eligible to shop to begin with (but the entrance workers do).

Nobody ever sat me down and explained this stuff to me. I figured it out by bothering to think about the situation for more than a couple of seconds.

But the biggest problem with this horrible article isn’t laziness. It’s entitlement.

I spend a lot of time defending the co-op. Many people who know me from my work life (when I had a work life) are surprised to hear that I’m a member. “Isn’t it facist?” is the most common response, which now makes me think of the 9/12 protesters, throwing around terms that they hadn’t bothered to look up in the dictionary before trekking all the way to Washington.

The co-op is essentially a socialist organization. It’s non-profit. Everybody works. If you are unable to do one job, then a job is found for you that fits your abilities. Quarterly statements are disclosed at open (to members) meetings, where the accountants are standing right there, and can be publicly taken to task by anyone, for any reason. So can the board members and the paid staff, all of whom can also be replaced, have their jobs eliminated, or voted out of office. Members of the co-op have more direct power over their own governance than do citizens of the United States.

The trade-off, as with any organization where the majority of decisions are made by committee, is that there is very little room for individual agency. Effecting change as an individual is hard. And, as each member works for less than three hours per month, it’s even harder. I’ve worked a handful of different co-op jobs, and in each one, I found areas that could be made a lot more efficient.

But when you do a job for less than three hours per month, your priority is not efficiency, especially since you know that any meaningful change will only come about through a bureaucracy. Ain adds the modifier “unhelpfully” to the cashier’s response above, as if to imply that the cashier owes her an extra effort, in order to ensure that her shopping experience is satisfactory.

And therein is the real issue. We see it all throughout the article: in Ain’s glee that she “scored” the “coveted” role of exit worker, in her disappointment that her rabbi husband has to work in the trenches with everyone else, and in her indignation at an older woman being “grilled” for missing her shift without first giving notice. Ain is, wrongly, thinking of the co-op as a typical, for-profit business, with a clear hierarchy, a focus on money and efficiency, and a staff that understands their rightful place to be at the foot of the customer.

But in these scenarios, there is no customer. And in most of them, there is no staff.

The “unhelpful” cashier might have been an investment banker, or a cop, or an electrical engineer. To suggest that, while he’s on his co-op shift, he needs to act like the cashier at a supermarket, is disingenuous. That’s just not how it works. Everyone involved has a role to play in this situation, but everyone is on equal footing. The member-as-shopper holding up the line because the member-as-cashier refuses to break the rules is the one being “unhelpful.” There is almost nobody in the entire organization with the power to personally change anything. Also, there is very little evaluation of the quality of anyone’s work. In order to get credit for your monthly shift, you mainly have to show up and stay for the whole thing. Members are incentivized to care about the quality of their work, not by the fear of getting fired or the hope of a raise (neither of which is possible), but because they care.

My own job (officially called a “workslot”) mainly consists of handing out visitor’s passes. Not long ago, when my usual partner was absent (and had properly arranged for a substitute), the guy filling in was shocked when I told him about the time that I had refused entry to a visitor who refused to show me proper identification.

“Seriously, dude?” My temporary co-worker had asked me. “Why?”

I felt myself starting to form the words “Because I’m supposed to.” But I knew that wasn’t why. I am not a person who usually does things just because I’m “supposed to” do them.

I realized then that I had caught the spirit of the place. I like my cheap, organic, locally-grown produce. I like my spices and cheeses, packaged in various quantities there in the store, but nevertheless sold at bulk prices. I like that I can walk into the cooler and have an intelligent conversation with the milk-stocking guy about the goat milk, where it comes from, and when it will be back in stock. And I like that bins of produce are often labeled with long, hand-written explanations of where and how the food was grown and transported, and why it isn’t available more often.

The main point of my workslot is to filter out visitors who aren’t really visitors– which is to say, they are persona non grata, either because they used to be members, but didn’t do their workslots and have been suspended for a long time (the usual reason), or for some other cause, which I can only imagine would have to involve a pretty egregious offense such as theft or violence. (I’m not writing this for the New York Times, so I’m not going to call Joe Holtz right now and ask.) I check the visitor’s ID, and look their name up in a database of past and present members. If they don’t show up in the records, then there’s no problem. If they do, then I have to check to see why they used to be a member, but are no longer.

During this process, I hear a lot of members and visitors complain that here is an example of the co-op as a paranoid, overly-vigilant, elitist club. And I have the perspective to understand why it might seem that way to people who haven’t bothered to learn more about it.

But these allegations just aren’t true. If visitors were allowed to enter the place indiscriminately, then members who owed make-ups would shop as visitors all the time. Which means that owing make-ups wouldn’t be a big deal. Which removes the only punishment for not bothering to show up for your workslot. Which removes the guarantee that, at any given time during operating hours, there is going to be anyone working at the co-op at all, in any position, except the relatively tiny group of paid staff members, who could not possibly do everything by themselves, or get anywhere close.

I used to work in a video store, and would sometimes get incredulous looks from customers when I told them that, yes, they would be charged a late fee for returning their movies late. And sometimes they would say: “Seriously, dude?” as if to suggest that I ought to transcend my function as a mindless worker bee and join them on Olympus, where we would sit around drinking nectar and quoting Ovid.

When an intelligent person agrees to do work that pays little or nothing, they have to make a decision. Either you treat the whole thing as a joke, demonstrating that the position should really have gone to someone else, or you make up an incentive for yourself that is not money.

A similar paradigm is needed to be happy as a member of the co-op. You don’t do it just for the low prices. You do it because you like the idea of the place.

The co-op is socialist in many ways, but it isn’t public, a contrast that may be confusing to some people. It is what it is. It works the way it works. And, more importantly, the reason it works is because it is the way it is. It’s not perfect, and it could stand a lot of improvement. But if you are ideologically opposed to it, or if, like Ain, you can’t even be bothered to consider the relevant ideology to begin with, then you should shop at Whole Foods. The lines are a lot faster, even if the store is all the way in Manhattan.

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