The Co-op and Its Collapse: Berkeley's Consumer Democracy Experiment

In nineteen thirty-nine, a group of Berkeley residents decided they were tired of buying groceries from people who did not share their values, and founded a consumer cooperative. The Berkeley Co-operative grew over the following four decades into something that had no precedent in American retail: grocery stores, a pharmacy, a service station, a newspaper, all owned by and operated for the benefit of its member-customers.

By the nineteen seventies, the California History journal and the Online Archive of California document, it was the largest consumer cooperative in the United States. The political logic was specific: democratic consumer control over the basic transactions of daily economic life. Not ownership by shareholders with no stake in the community. Not management by executives with no accountability to the people they served. A grocery store where the people who shopped there made the decisions.

It collapsed in the late nineteen eighties. Conventional supermarket chains, with their economies of scale and their willingness to operate on thinner margins, undercut the Co-op's pricing. Internal management disputes and structural weaknesses that the California History journal documents contributed to the failure. The Co-op closed.

In the decade after it closed, Whole Foods Market arrived in Berkeley and other cities, selling organic food in an aesthetic that closely resembled the Co-op's sensibility. The packaging, the bulk bins, the emphasis on provenance. The ownership was completely conventional. The idea the Co-op had represented, that the values and the structure of ownership should match, lost. The aesthetic survived and was sold back.