Berkeley Co-Op: Exhibit Highlights History of a Different Way to Shop

There was a time — “back in the day” — when grocery shopping wasn’t such an onerous chore. Instead of hauling one crying kid in the shopping cart and a whining one trailing behind, shoppers simply left the children with smiling workers at the Consumers Cooperatives of Berkeley “kiddie korral.”

As they shopped, they’d run into friends, read the food and environmental advice from home economists on the co-op staff, do their political due diligence by observing a boycott of Nestle products or Coors beer and chat with unionized checkers on the way out.

All that — and much more — is recapped in the ’s exhibit of of the Consumer Cooperative of Berkeley, which runs Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through Sept. 10, 1-4 p.m., at the society's center, 1931 Center St.

On Sunday, Sept. 4, at 3 p.m., Bob Schildgen, former Co-op News editor and former board member, will moderate a panel discussion with Chuck Wollenberg, author and history professor; Bruce Miller, former Co-op board president; and Linda Rosen, co-curator of the exhibit and BHS past president. Admission is free.

Miller, Rosen and Therese Pipe, the other co-curator of the exhibit, took Berkeley Patch on a tour through the exhibit. They traced the origins of the CCB to buyers’ clubs, started during the 1930s depression era. In 1937, the CCB opened its first brick and mortar location, a 10-by-20 foot storefront at 2491 Shattuck Ave.

From the very beginning, the emphasis was on consumer education. “They had an education committee led by women,” Rosen said. “And they had a nutrition committee.”

Environmental education was another part of the mix. According to artisan and author John Curl, writing in For All People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements and Communalism in America, the CCB’s first recycling program began “in the very first months with egg cartons, offering a half cent per carton rebate.”

Soon after it opened its first storefront in 1937, the growing enterprise moved to University Avenue, just west of Sacramento Street. Miller points out the significance of this location: in Berkeley’s early history, people of color could not purchase homes above Sacramento Street. Miller said locating the store in west Berkeley was in keeping with the co-op’s determination to be unbiased — in hiring as well as membership.

The coop continued to grow and eventually included more than 100,000 members who purchased $82 million per year of goods and services. In addition to the growing number of food stores, the coop added natural food stores, a gas station, a book store, a hardware store, a credit union and a bank.

In 1955 the coop hired its first home economist. Her job was to educate people about some of the duplicitous marketing practices various companies employed, such as packaging breaded shrimp so that, as Pike said, “There was too much breading and too little shrimp.” Pike explained that the work of the CCB home economists eventually led to new laws requiring fair labeling.

The home economists wrote columns in the Co-op News that reached the entire membership, compiled information that shoppers could pick up in stores, and spent time in the stores, educating consumers one on one.

The CCB was radical for its time: in 1970 it began selling organic produce, the same year it banned the sale of pesticides. Five years later it banned the sale of fluorocarbon-containing aerosols. In 1985, the CCB went on record opposing irradiation of food.

The coop was run by an elected board, which, at times, was at odds with managers. The managers’ focus would be on the bottom line, while the board wanted to support boycotts, restrict products that hurt the environment and pay fair wages.

 “In the latter days of the co-op,” Miller said, “some of the board members took the attitude that unless we continued with these programmatic activities like the home economist and consumer education, unless we made room for that in the budget, even if business circumstances were changing, it was no longer a co-op and it was no longer worth running the business because there are these other food stores up the street that will give you lower prices in fact.”

People are still talking about the 1988 demise of the co-op. One can read various viewpoints in What Happened to the Berkeley Co-op? with an introduction by Ralph Nader and articles by various former co-op board members, employees and others, including Robert Schildgen, who will be speaking at the Sept. 4 Berkeley Historical Society panel. The book is on line at http://www.megacz.com/otherpeople/what.happened.to.the.berkeley.co-op.pdf.

People often point to unwise business practices, such as expanding to too many stores beyond Berkeley, as the reason for the demise of the co-op. But Schildgen says the CCB died because it no longer paid attention to its core principles.

“In fact,” he wrote, “neglect of principles became so serious in the later years that CCB had, in many respects, ceased to be a co-op....It was no longer a vital democratic social organization with the high level of member participation it once enjoyed.”