[jancsika]

Curious that you include REI. It's a retail coop model, not a worker-owned coop.

Apropos: the way they ended the REI Adventures program is behavior consistent with a normal big-box chain. That is, announce the end simultaneously to their customers and REI's partner adventure companies, provide refunds to customers, but don't forward the relevant same customer info to the partners for rebooking because that's REI's proprietary data.

If that's also behavior consistent with a worker-owned coop, I have to ask: what is the social benefit of worker-owned over a normal corporate structure? And if it's not, why point the user to REI for a pair of hiking shorts?

[dendrite9]

REI changed about 25 years ago and it took a while for people to notice/the changes to filter through enough. Was talking recently about similar changes with MEC in Canada with a family friend who joined MEC as member 200-250. He had a chance to be in the first ~25 members but wasn't sure they'd still exist in a year.

I think there still is value in a retail coop model but I think REI strayed from the area where it could work well. They may not have been able to run forever without changing but the way it has changed is a bit sad to see. I suspect there has to be a strong mission statement and way to hold to it for a retail coop to thrive long term. Or maybe just to keep the size small enough to avoid some of the harder questions.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> REI changed about 25 years ago

Changed how? It was always a consumer co-op, never a worker owned co-op. I joined in 1981.

[dendrite9]

Ah, I did a poor job conveying what I meant. You are correct of course. I was referring more to a change in the culture of the board and methods members could use to nominate board members.

Also to clarify we were talking about MEC (Mountain Equipment Coop) which was inspired by REI and is no longer a coop.

[IESAI_ski]

Appreciate the feedback and the info. I included REI in the directory (labeled as customer co-op not a worker co-op) but not in the search results but now I realize that's lame. I'm just gonna take them off entirely.

[dredmorbius]

NB, there have been other customer co-ops, most notably in the food/grocery space though few survived the growth of major commercial / joint-stock "natural food" stores, most notably today Whole Foods, though the trend was pretty evident by the late 1980s / 1990s.

There are also worker-owned food co-ops (Rainbow Grocery in SF is one), as well as a few surviving customer-owned co-ops (nearest to the Bay Area I'm aware of is the Davis Food Co-Op), though at one time there were far more.

Occasionally one may stumble across old-school grocery co-ops in unexpected places. Three Rivers in Knoxville, TN, comes to mind.

There's a list of US food co-ops here: <https://www.grocery.coop/all-coops/>.

[DANmode]

> what is the social benefit of worker-owned

No capital-risking, and then rent-seeking, middleman, if I’m following.

[goodmythical]

I think they're saying "If REI makes the list because this is common in the space, what is the benefit of worker owned?" in trying to bolster the case that REI should not be listed.

If many of the worker-owned co-ops would prevent access to relevant customer data to prevent individual workers from developing relations with customer without the co-op in the middle, then that's something that could potentially be addressed by other co-ops in that you could deliberately structure it such that the co-op is either optionally or deliberately a platform for fostering worker/customer interactions rather than co-op/customer interactions.

Because if the co-op exists for the sake of the co-op while splitting profit with the workers, that is different from a co-op that exists solely to maximally aid the individual workers.

Kind of like the back/front of house tip debate. Should chefs be payed as tipped salaries? Should we all get regular wages and evenly split tips? Even in front of house, if Sarah is consistently pulling twice my average tips, it's not really fair to her (or technically her customers) that we split tips because the customers were so taken by her service that they wanted to assist her whereas I'm just some random person from their point of view and contributed nothing to her customers from her point of view. The analogy is that the company wants to split the tips because it benefits them by allowing them to more easily retain employees in situations where they feel it's worth keeping the ones that aren't getting big tips because their performance is "good enough" and they don't want the spend on hiring to replace - the benefit is too the company and the 'worse' wait staff, not the one who's actually responsible for the value add.

[DANmode]

The easy reply is: REI is pretty unusual,

and: what are the next two or three “problematic” companies on the list?