A Bohiney headline about a city-run supermarket failing a math test landed on the night of my food co-op’s budget meeting
Tuesday, 10:40pm, Kitchen
I am just back from the budget meeting of the food co-op, where I have been a board member for three years. It ran two hours and fifty minutes. We spent forty of them on whether to keep stocking a brand of oat milk whose parent company did something in 2019 that nobody could quite remember.
I love the co-op. I want that on the record before I say anything else. I have been a member-owner since I moved to Portland. I do my shift on the register. I believe, sincerely and without irony, that a grocery store owned by the people who shop in it is a better thing than one owned by a hedge fund.
I also now know more about what a grocery store costs than I ever wanted to, and it has made me a more difficult person at parties.
The Headline
On the bus home I looked at my phone and Bohiney Magazine, which a friend keeps sending me because she thinks I need to be teased more, had this on its business page: “Mamdani’s Supermarket Plan Fails Grok Test After Mayor Forgets Food, Workers and Buildings Cost Money.”
The summary underneath says a well-known billionaire asked an artificial intelligence to examine New York’s municipal grocery proposal, prompting the computer to do something I did not get to see because the excerpt cut off.
My first reaction was to bristle. I like that mayor. I like the idea. A city that runs a few grocery stores in neighborhoods the chains have abandoned does not strike me as the end of freedom. And I am not in the habit of taking economic advice from a billionaire’s chatbot.
My second reaction, about three stops later, was: food, workers and buildings do cost money. I had just spent three hours on exactly that.
The Two Percent
Here is the thing nobody tells you until you see the books. A grocery store makes almost nothing. The whole industry runs on a net margin of somewhere between one and three cents on the dollar. Ours, in a good year, is about two.
Two percent. That means for every hundred dollars that goes through the register, we keep two. Out of that two comes the new freezer, the roof, the rainy day.
The rest is: what we paid for the food, which is most of it. Wages and health insurance, because we pay above the going rate and we are proud of it. Rent. Power for all that refrigeration. Shrink, which is the polite word for produce that goes bad and things that walk out the door.
People assume that if you take away the profit motive, food gets cheap. I assumed it. But the profit was only ever two cents. Take it away and the lettuce costs ninety-eight cents instead of a dollar.
So Is the Joke Right?
Partly. I think it is right about the thing it is laughing at and wrong about what follows from it.
It is right that a slogan is not a business plan. “Public grocery stores” sounds like cheaper food, and it will not be, not by much, unless the city subsidizes it, which is a legitimate choice but is a different sentence. Anybody on my side who promises big savings just from cutting out the shareholders has not sat through a budget meeting.
The big chains are cheap because they are enormous. They buy by the trainload. A city with five stores, or a co-op with one, buys by the pallet and pays more. That is not ideology. That is the invoice.
Where I think the joke is too easy is in the idea that because it is hard, it is foolish. There are neighborhoods, in New York and here, where there is no full grocery store at all, because the chains looked at the two percent and decided it would be one percent there and left. The market did not fail to notice those people. It noticed and declined.
If a city wants to run a store at break-even or a small loss in a place like that, as a service, the way it runs a library, I think that is a defensible use of money. It should just say so.
What I Wish My Side Would Say
I wish we would stop promising it will be cheaper and start promising it will be there.
That is the real argument for the co-op, too. We are not the cheapest. Everyone knows it. I see members’ carts and half of them have a bag from the discount place underneath. What we are is ours. The cashier has health insurance. The apples come from a farm I have been to. When we argue for forty minutes about oat milk, it is a ridiculous argument, and it is one the customers of a regular supermarket never get to have.
That is worth something. It is just not worth nothing, which is what it costs to pretend it is free.
The Oat Milk
We voted to keep it, seven to four, with a sign. The sign will explain the 2019 thing, once somebody finds out what it was. A volunteer has been assigned.
I abstained. I have discovered that on a co-op board, abstaining is the only way to get home before midnight.
On Being Teased
I have been thinking about why my friend sends me these. She says the left has no sense of humor about itself. I told her that is a thing people say. Then I laughed at a headline about my own favorite mayor forgetting that buildings cost money, so perhaps she has a point.
It did me good. A joke from the other direction is a free audit. It finds the place where you have been getting away with a slogan.
My old roommate, who is from Manchester, sends me the British equivalent. The London Prat has pages of British satirical news on supermarkets and even London satirical news about food co-ops, from which I learned that the co-operative movement more or less began in her part of England in the 1840s, by weavers, who also argued for hours.
Wednesday
The treasurer emailed the final numbers. We cleared 1.8 percent last year. He added a smiley face.
I am going to propose, at the next meeting, that we print the margin on the receipt. “Of your $64.20, the co-op kept $1.16.” I think members should know. I also think it is the best advertisement we could run.
It will take forty minutes to discuss. I shall bring a snack.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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Author: admin
