The cooperative alternative
By banding together and democratically sharing resources of all kinds, we enable ourselves to help one another meet our needs for affordable goods and services.
By Lisa Rayner - Tea Party Publisher

Is there an alternative to Big Box stores and other mega-corporations? Supporters of Big Box stores in Flagstaff often point out that Big Box retailers provide residents with a greater range of products, at cheaper prices, than was previously available to local shoppers. Unfortunately, Big Box stores bring us these amenities while diminishing other aspects of our quality of life, like creativity, democracy, community accountability and self-determination. 

This is because the Big Boxes and other transnational corporations are huge, oligarchically run economies that are designed to make a profit for their shareholders and upper-level managers. They have neither legal obligations nor formal social ties to communities in which their operations are located. This sole obligation to make money erodes communities' real wealth. Real wealth is not money but tangible community assets like healthy ecosystems, abundant natural resources, social connectivity, unique community character that comes from the intelligence and creativity of residents, and much more. 

Big Box supporters seem to think that there is no alternative, except going backwards to a simpler way of life that no longer exists and is generally no longer wanted. Luckily, this is not true. There is an alternative that allows people and their communities to reap the advantages of bigness, such as economies of scale, while keeping the benefits of smallness, like creativity and democracy. This alternative is already benefiting many residents in the Flagstaff area and could be expanded to truly improve everyone's life.

It is called cooperation! By banding together and democratically sharing resources of all kinds, we enable ourselves to help one another meet our needs for affordable goods and services as well as for non-monetary needs like close social ties, creative, meaningful work, healthy local ecosystems, and a beautiful place to live. 

Cooperation can take many forms. Businesses can cooperate with one another and with others who are affected by their operations, such as customers, communities and suppliers. Worker owned and consumer cooperatives are directly accountable to their members. Federations of cooperatives (cooperatives of cooperatives) provide regional, national and global sharing of information, goods and services. 

Small businesses can cooperate with one another to lower their costs and share information. Such cooperation allows smaller enterprises to collectively attain larger economies of scale, leading to a lowering of their retail prices. An example of this type of cooperation on a larger-scale is the Ace hardware brand. Individual Ace hardware stores collectively own the central corporate entity. The Ace corporation is therefore fully accountable to its independently owned local hardware stores. This is the opposite practice of most franchise operations, and all chains, in which the central corporation hierarchically governs individual stores. Another local example is the new Arizona Shopping & Attraction Consortium, a nonprofit online corporation that allows small merchants, restaurateurs and artisans to advertise their wares globally. 

Democratically run worker-owned businesses provide democratic accountability, healthy working conditions and fair financial compensation for employees. An example with local connections is Tucson Cooperative Warehouse, a worker-run natural foods wholesaler located in Tucson. TCW supplies hundreds of stores and restaurants throughout the West. Natural food stores like Flagstaff's Mountain Harvest order many of their products from TCW. 

TCW also sells to individuals, buying clubs and natural foods cooperatives. This brings us to another form of cooperation: consumer cooperatives. Consumer cooperatives allow people to collectively reduce their costs of living. 

More than a dozen Flagstaff area buying clubs order products monthly from TCW. One of these clubs is Common Ground Cooperative. I have belonged to Common Ground for seven years. Once a month a TCW delivery truck unloads member's orders at Pine Forest charter school. Members pay an 8 percent or 16 percent mark-up depending on whether or not they work about an hour to unload the delivery on the day of the order. The mark-up pays for the overhead costs of running the coop. The coop lowers my family's food costs, allowing us to enjoy higher-quality food for less money. 

Consumer cooperatives not only involve the buying of goods and services for individuals, they can also involve group ownership of items and the sharing of information. Public libraries are a well-known example of this kind of sharing. Other examples of cooperative organizations include cohousing groups, car cooperatives, some day-care arrangements, tool libraries, toy libraries, seed exchanges and credit unions, among others. 

Community stakeholder arrangements make corporations democratically accountable to everyone affected by their operations, including local communities, suppliers, employees and customers. This is in contrast to most corporations, which only have one legal group of stakeholders, their shareholders. Such complete community accountability would require major changes in corporate structure and law in order to give all stakeholders equal legal say. 

Internationally, communities and cooperatives can share information, as well as provide services that require very large scales to be effective. For example, the International Cooperative Alliance is "an international non-governmental organization which unites, represents and serves co-operatives worldwide." 

Conceivably, today's undemocratic, money-oriented transnational corporations could decentralize into cooperatives of cooperatives. Imagine Flagstaff's Big Box stores becoming locally owned, democratically run, ecologically sustainable enterprises! Such restructuring can happen from both the inside and the outside. Buy-out funds could be made available to employees, customers and communities who wish to make large corporations democratically accountable to all stakeholders. Corporate law could be changed to require full corporate democratic accountability. 

Here in Flagstaff, a locally owned credit union is forming that would provide loans for democratic, ecologically sustainable, stakeholder enterprises. Flagstaff Tea Party will keep you posted on its development.

An 11-year resident of Flagstaff, Lisa Rayner holds an Interpretation of Natural Resources degree from Northern Arizona University. She is a master gardener and permaculture consultant. She is also the author of Growing Food in the Southwest Mountains.