In the basement, members with colorful kerchiefs tied around their heads bag nuts and spices, price cuts of meat, and chisel blocks of cheese. cards to admit them into the building, and they look after other members’ kids in the child-care room. They ring up groceries, count cash, scrub toilets, and sweep the floor. Members unload delivery trucks and stock shelves. Today, there are more than seventeen thousand, which makes it the biggest food coöperative run on member labor in the country, and, most likely, the world. In the late eighties, the Co-op had seventeen hundred members. The place runs on sweat equity: your blood for bread, your labor for lox.
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“Shopper” and “member” are all right, and so are “shopping member,” “member-worker,” and “member-owner.” Everyone who can afford it pays a twenty-five-dollar joining fee, plus an “investment” of a hundred bucks, returned upon leaving, and everyone works.
Sometimes on the building’s intercom system-available to everyone for paging out requests, announcements, or complaints-someone will make the mistake of using the word “customer,” and invariably someone else will page right back to point out that there is no such thing as a customer here. But the carts, when they came, were not greeted with universal relief one member wrote to the Linewaiters’ Gazette, the Co-op’s biweekly newspaper, to complain that they were turning the Co-op into “a suburban, John Sununu nightmare.” For years, even after the Co-op took over the building and expanded its offerings to things like toilet paper and batteries, members kept lugging boxes around the store. There were stairs, which members descended perilously, clutching boxes laden with peaches and tomatoes and other produce from Hunts Point, the wholesale market in the Bronx. The Co-op opened in 1973, in a room of the Mongoose Community Center, a leftist hangout on the second floor of 782 Union Street. The noblest aspirations of civilized society versus the base reality of human nature is a theme that frequently comes up at the Park Slope Food Co-op. It is also against the rules to drag a walker beyond the Co-op’s strict walking bounds, though some members, when they have escaped the reach of the institutional eye, will try to get away with murder. It is against one of the Co-op’s many rules for the shopper to have the walker do the pushing that’s the shopper’s responsibility.
It’s pushed by a Co-op member, who is accompanied by another, in an orange crossing-guard vest: a walker, in Co-op parlance, who will return the cart after the shopper has unloaded her groceries at her house or her car, or hauled them into the Grand Army Plaza subway station. Here comes one now, rattling catastrophically, like Max Roach whaling on the high hat. Baby strollers compete for space with dogs of all sizes, shoals of high-school students, and shopping carts from the Park Slope Food Co-op. They crash against the stoops of landmarked brownstones and split over the roots of oak and sycamore trees, menacing the ankles of pedestrians. The sidewalks of north Park Slope must be among the narrowest and most uneven in Brooklyn.
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