Comment by prisenco
16 hours ago
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.
I was a co-owner of the Park Slope Food Coop, I believe the countries oldest and largest cooperative grocery store.
We have about 18,000 owners, everyone had to work a 4 hour shift every month, and we did something like $50MM in annual revenue competing directly with whole foods.
We would also provide training, startup capital and member labor to people who wanted to start their own coop.
I always felt like a well organized group could take over the PSFC and create a new tech model and then scale from within the existing democratic infrastructure.