Comment by ada1981

There's a lot of potential and precedence even if there isn't much discussion. It's clear that while people may not always like the market for needs like housing and healthcare, they strongly prefer it for consumer goods and services. A cooperative is a way to engage with the market without running into the problems of large for-profit enterprises.

The hard parts are:

1. capitalization - once you have investors who have more say than employees, it's no longer very cooperative

2. legal - the structures for for-profit or hierarchical non-profits are well defined and there are any number of experienced law firms that can help structure a business, while for a cooperative not so much

3. structural - there are a thousand books published every year about for-profit businesses. There are comparatively few about starting and running a cooperative. Although the latter have more signal than the noise of the former.

These aren't insurmountable problems, though. They've been solved before.

| Amazon as a coop

A cooperative Amazon would probably work best as a federation of cooperatives.