Karol at Alarming News find us a link to the Simon’s Brain Blog post where Simon gets fed up with his co-op food center. With the people, with the poor quality of service as well as the more often than not poor quality of the produce, the smell of the place as well as it’s lame rules and layout and just the all-around craptasitc nature of socialism in practice.
Simon practiced free market capitalism and decided to ditch the place for a store that sold the items he wanted but didn’t give him the hassle.
If you are one of those naïve people (younger than 25) who think communism is a good idea in principle, you need to spend 30 minutes in the food Coop. See how petty, bitter and mean people become when they are working for the collective. Everyone is paranoid that everyone else is shirking on their responsibilities, not working hard enough or disobeying a rule they themselves obey. I’ve been told off more times than I can count for such minor offences as leaving the queue for a moment to grab something I forgot, having 16 items in my basket instead of 15 when on line in the express queue, reaching over somebody’s head, not having my membership card out and ready the second it was requested and on and on… By the time you are done in there you want to shatter glass with a hysterical screaming fit.
Working there was even worse; you’d always get one hideous person on your shift. Someone whose every word would bring you closer to a spasm of homicidal/suicidal rage. They’d always be into Italian hip-hop, Maori chanting, crocheting or some other random absurdity that affirmed their status as the dullard of the universe. Either that or they’d be a busybody, a person in love with the coop. The equivalent to an informer in communist Russia, the kind of person who would have you killed with a sly word in the right ear.
If it wasn’t for the San Francisco metro area, I would have to say that Seattle had the highest food co-op/membership privileges produce market saturations per capita.
In fact, that is the reason the Analog Wife does the vast majority of the shopping in our house: I can’t put up with the bullshit. She joins these places like it’s an addiction. If I go to the co-op down the road (and there is a co-op down the road from just about everyplace I’ve every lived in this town), I end up making plans to nuke the place before I get halfway done. If I go to the produce place I get scowls because they can somehow tell that ‘I’m not one of them’, probably because I almost always look like I’m going to work and we know about hippies and work (or maybe it is the leather logger boots). If I go to the regular supermarket, I have to deal with some creepy asshat either outside the store protesting the business’ “Capitalistic Destructionâ€? or in the aisles loudly talking about said ‘Destruction’ while shopping for one very inexpensive item (that way, they’re not protesting and the store can’t kick them out, you see).
If you really want to see something funny though, check out how the co-opers go after each other in this post found linked in the comments at Simon’s.
And one point about the constant waiting in lines at co-ops: a goodly number of these folks are buying their organic food to be ‘healtier’. I bet that it would just kill them to know that they wasted most of those extra hours/days/years they got from ‘eating healthy’ standing in line to buy food at the co-op.