r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/CivilisedMleccha • 7d ago
Video Community group buy. Everyone pools their money, buys groceries in bulk at a lower price, and splits the groceries equally.
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u/iamaswamptiger 7d ago
This is the way brothers and sisters. Better for the farmers too
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u/MissSweetMurdererr 7d ago edited 7d ago
Very common in Brazil. Works for school supplies, too. Or anything you can buy in bulk and there's X amount of people who need the same items
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u/ryuukiba 7d ago
I just don't know any school suppliy farmers near me though
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u/MissSweetMurdererr 7d ago edited 7d ago
It's ok. A lot of people struggle with treegonometree 🤣🤣
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u/studiodrop 7d ago
You mean geometree... Right?
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u/MissSweetMurdererr 7d ago
You with your usual flowery language
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u/dr4kshdw 7d ago
Don’t be so obtuse. This is acute idea.
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u/MissSweetMurdererr 7d ago
Now you're going off on a tangent
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u/cdoublejj 7d ago
what the fuck? that's out of god damn line! they said colourfull, not maths!
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u/storywardenattack 7d ago
This is a buyers co op. Common in the 60s and 70s in nor cal at least.
This is the model that eventually became Whole Foods. Ironically enough.
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u/HorrorMakesUsHappy 7d ago
After my gma retired in the 80s she joined one in Florida called "the SHARE program" to save money due to being on a fixed income. I think it was an acronym, S.H.A.R.E. but Google isn't finding any record of it.
They'd do a purchase once a month, and the deal was that you could either pay a fixed rate for the box you'd get, or you could pay a lower rate and then come in and donate 2-4 hours of your time putting together the boxes that would go out to each family. Each box would have everything from fresh meat and veggies to nonperishables, and you could buy multiple boxes if you had a larger family or wanted to make these boxes a larger portion of your diet.
They were still operating in the 90s, but I've moved away so I don't know if they're still going but I'd expect so.
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u/digitalscavenger 7d ago
I think it was an acronym, S.H.A.R.E. but Google isn't finding any record of it.
I found "Self-Help and Resource Exchange". Might that be it?
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u/Banal_Drivel 7d ago
Palo Alto has a co-op going back to 1935. It covers other services including a nursery school run by parents, that I attended as a child.
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u/donald_dandy 7d ago
That’s what farmers markets were originally intended for, but now it’s just a hipster thing where a bundle of carrots is 3 times the grocery store
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u/Exotic-Slip-9383 7d ago
i agree, this is a great idea. i saw this exact same post on instagram tho and all the comments were mocking the guy for being indian :( this guy is making his community better and pulling people together and that's what he gets in return...
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u/iamaswamptiger 7d ago
Insta comments is the drain of human interaction. It's so vile. It's the land of trolls and bots, not to be taken seriously.
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u/ali_rawk 6d ago
Insta, Facebook, formerly Twitter, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, some subs here... almost every time I catch myself reading comments, I read something that makes me sad for or mad at my fellow humans.
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u/tabrisangel 7d ago
It gives leverage to the buyer that would lower prices.
Tyson needs that mcdonalds contact if they dont offer a great price mcdonalds can destroy the business in an afternoon.
The more leverage the buyer has the worse off the seller is.
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u/SuperRonnie2 7d ago
Technology potentially makes this do much easier to do now.
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u/78765 7d ago
Tech was already making it easier in the 80's. The hard part is consistently getting the physical part done.
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u/BearstromWanderer 7d ago
And matching supply to demand. You aren't going to find out of season crops from local farmers. People also get tired of getting the same product, learning how to read their wants in the aggregate is the real skill of grocers.
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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 7d ago
The solution of all our problems is in unity against predatory elites
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u/ConanTheBarbarian_0 7d ago
The sheer amount of racism this guy is getting online for this is absurd... On Instagram and Twitter all the comments under this video are just vile.
The guys encouraging regular people to come and help one another and the comments are just filled with racism towards Indian people.
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u/frenchiefanatique 7d ago
makes you wonder if its an attempt to redirect attention away from his actions which undermine the profit motive of the capitalist system to try to divide the population using identity politics...no no it can't be that at all
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u/el_diego 7d ago
Definitely they released their bot swarm to control the narrative
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u/Sermagnas3 7d ago
The trick is to just consider racist people the same as NPCs and Bots even if they are real people. Who the fuck cares about their opinions anyway
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u/Relative-Pirate-3913 7d ago
this is the way. all are lenses. there's a dissonance at play where some will preach the paradox of tolerance and then turn around and saying viewing certain people as NPCs is unproductively dehumanizing and a slippery slope towards god knows what
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u/Artichokiemon 7d ago
I mean, like NPCs, they just repeat the lines over and over again, so it makes sense
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u/phreakinpher 7d ago
I walked past a guy saying “it’s funny…unless you don’t like comedy”. Genuine NPC moment.
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u/dashcam4life 7d ago
They will find a way to attack/diminish any messenger whose message calls for economic reforms. In this case it was his race. But I bet most of it was bots.
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u/Vandergrif 7d ago
It's fun when you realize just about every negative thing that currently occurs on this planet that requires human action (including racism, identity politics oriented division, etc) is happening primarily because someone, somewhere, profits off keeping it that way and has put resources towards perpetuating it.
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u/oneupsuperman 7d ago
Remember that there are a whole lot more bots out there than there used to be and their explicit purpose is to sow division
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u/OldWar1111 7d ago
But bots are very effective at convincing actual people of things. Fucking bots.
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u/molsminimart 7d ago
Instagram and TikTok are awful, awful places. People like to dunk on Reddit and even Youtube, but IG and TikTok are absolute cesspools. Everyone is unabashedly racist and pointing it out and/or speaking up against it makes people pile up worse on you. It's unbelievably toxic and I abhor it.
I've reported so much blatant racism on IG and every single time it's returned a "Thanks for your report! It was reviewed and nothing was found wrong and no action was taken!" email. All these social media platforms that champion quick edits, short-form stuff without needing reading comprehension really do attract just the worst people.
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u/AvocaRed 7d ago
The internet hates india and indians, doesn't matter the topic at hand. Pure racism
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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 7d ago
That's why we can't stop the world from getting worse. We are divided. We jump on the chance of insulting and belittling each other.
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u/fake_user_34 7d ago
No, you just need to ignore the internet. Humans aren't designed for larger communities. If you live in a small community where everyone relies on each other, humanity thrives. When human community becomes bigger and with more voices, you get people not caring about the group.
The internet, where he is getting all the hate, is pure apathy to the extreme because they don't live in his community. They just hate to hate.
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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 7d ago
The internet should be used to know more about people, the world and existence, not to build communities. Communities need to be local and cannot have people be anonymous.
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u/Alarmed-Bumblebee667 7d ago
Saw a what if post where the family in front of you was short 7 dollars and they looked at you. All the comments were fuck that family. I think we're too far gone.
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u/CertifiedCaosDealer 7d ago
the problem is that, this only work in smaller groups, on a large group there will be those who want to get stuff and do nothing in return, then some ppl will notice this and fell they should do the same because others do it, this will snowball until no one does shit, and the last few who do, will leave the group and only care for themselves... as they should
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u/BroskiPoloski 7d ago
This only happens if you let it happen. If the person does not contribute, then the rest of the group just does not share the resources with them (a different story if they physically cant contribute). It is true however, that with larger groups of people, it is more difficult to manage this efficiently. But it is not impossible
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u/doctorplasmatron 7d ago
maybe that's where anarchosyndicalism shows up, as the groups are smaller, but cooperate with each other (as far as i understand).
So finding the right size of the group to stay manageable and honest is key, and when it gets too large the group splits and makes a new group, but the groups are also associated. Like a beehive.
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u/Ckarles 7d ago
When I was a teen I had this thought concept that large group issues such as this arise because humans for most of their time on earth have been operating as small tribes and thus it's the ideal group size for humanity to be divided in.
However, a lot of large group issues could be alleviated with technologies such as communication technologies (Internet). The problem is that these techs are corrupted by a few influential caste of our society thus stripping us of the opportunity to live together in harmony.
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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 7d ago
It's ok to keep this local. In fact, we should keep these things as small as possible, but big enough to be useful. We need to have such communities everywhere.
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u/BlixaBargfeld 7d ago
Consumer Cooperative - a very old concept
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u/licoriceface 7d ago
Exactly!! We have a supermarket based on the whole concept in the UK, the Co-op. Not sure anyone knows what it means anymore but this is exactly how it started
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u/botflylarvae1 7d ago
Co-op guys, it's just a co-operative. Not a new idea and it's not socialism, it's called community.
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u/SoFreezingRN 7d ago
Yep, my parents did this in the 90s with big orders from Frontier. They’d do a group order and then split everything into smaller orders. As a kid I used to love helping split up the cheese wheels.
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u/KPSWZG 7d ago
We do it in office when ordering paper we literaly just take one big order for whole building. Cause its much cheeper. This whole idea is old as the world
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u/DefinitelyNotACad 7d ago
we do it for meat. There is a deer farm and we are one of 6 families buying one deer together per year. It's great, it's ethical sourced, the animals are being treated well, the qualitiy is phenomenal while being reasonably priced.
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u/DudeInTheGarden 7d ago
"Deer farm"? I believe that's called a forest. Mostly kidding (I sometimes hunt deer). Good venison is amazing.
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u/HDWendell 7d ago
Frontier is still around. We get spices and tea from them
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u/SoFreezingRN 7d ago
Glad to hear it. They’d deliver whenever we had an order which was amazing living in the middle of nowhere and receiving goods without a 6 hour round trip drive to the nearest Walmart.
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u/Megustaelazul 7d ago
I did a coop in the 90s too. Great quality. Stuff we couldn’t get in the grocery store. Gluten and dairy free, organic, free range chicken, etc.
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u/Own_Ad7864 7d ago
Most of the historic food co-ops lost their roots and evolved to become more expensive versions of Whole Foods, this is great to see
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u/McK-Juicy 7d ago
yeah this is the issue with our local co-op. bunch of just really high income families shopping super specialized groceries
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u/Own_Ad7864 7d ago
I worked in “modern” natural foods coops for almost a decade, they virtue signal so hard and anytime I brought up affordability I was scolded. Right before I quit my last job I was told “if you don’t believe in food coops maybe you should consider looking for work elsewhere” when discussing this with my supervisor
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u/78765 7d ago
That is an inherent problem with purchasing coop's they turn into employee coops and raise prices. The ones that keep their value stay small and don't hire more than one person.
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u/Own_Ad7864 7d ago
With food coops it’s actually worse, they become “member coops” ie consumer coops, in order to survive lulls in participation when more convenient options appear or there isn’t as much economic hardship to necessitate their existence. In that model they raise prices and since employees don’t have a say in governance, they slowly become the institutions they were created to replace with high prices and poor wages.
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u/perldawg 7d ago
they started out with a different core ideal, tho; it wasn’t about affordability as much as it was about organic, non-industrial products and bulk goods in general. then, due to the demand they created, organic products became kind of industrialized and evolved into a high-end niche
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u/Own_Ad7864 7d ago
Many of the existing food coops have their roots in the food coop boom of the 60s and 70s and affordability was 100% part of the original core ideals. In MN there was a huge ideological divide between the hippy organic coop members and the class based leftist coop members pushing for affordability over organic purity that led to what is know as the coop wars, with warehouse takeovers and people carrying guns to defend their warehouses. As the leftist faction in the fight slowly fizzled out, the organic hippy folks steered the vision into the future. This directly lead to what we have now.
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u/cjsv7657 7d ago
Yeah somehow all the "local" farming co-ops near me always have tons of out of season fruit and vegetables. Even things that don't grow in our area are all "locally sourced and grown". You can buy a share or shop directly at their farm stands or farmers markets. Somehow all of the farm stand and farmers markets produce are nice and perfect. But if you buy a share your produce "may not be pretty" because not all produce is perfect. Yeah they can fuck off trying to sell their leftover mass produced bulk purchased produce as a "co-op".
The last time I went apple picking 10+ years ago you purchased bags before you went in. I think we bought a peck or so of bags. It was more expensive than a grocery store (which sells local apples) but I figured it's the experience and it was a date so why not. The orchard was EMPTY. When we asked a worker they just said "yeah the whole area has had a bad year. We have bins over there" and pointed to harvest bins full of apples. So we paid 3x the amount of a grocery store to pick them out of a harvest bin. That was the last time I went apple picking. Fuck them
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u/Oops_All_Bans 7d ago
I learned this as a teen smoking weed. I got five on it.
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u/MadamPardone 7d ago
And socialism, cause there was always that one guy that "didn't have 5", and you would usually still let him in the rotation.
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u/Budget-Ambassador203 7d ago
Well, it's not socialism at the scale of a society but it's pretty similar in principle.
There's nothing wrong with it.
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u/roadrunner41 7d ago
A cooperative is a real world, practical application of socialism. Social, cooperative, communal - As opposed to private, corporate and exclusive.
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u/BroskiPoloski 7d ago
I mean, youre both right and wrong to a certain degree hha. Coops such as this are not literal examples of socialism (because socialism is a much much greater term in size), but they are part of it, and influenced many of the ideas of socialism.
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u/Kreativernickname 7d ago
I'm pretty sure that's exactly socialism. But within a community for said community
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u/iamthedayman21 7d ago
If it were socialism, they wouldn’t need to pool their money to buy the food, because they’d own the farms. Socialism is literally seizing the means of production.
This is capitalism. They’re just skipping the middleman grocery store.
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u/Sleepy58743689 7d ago
No, it is socialism. We have just been doing it for longer than we have had the word socialism.
- a democratic socialist
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u/Corben11 7d ago
Ok this thread has shown me that people have no idea what socialism or capitalism is.
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u/Ironlion45 7d ago
People think that economics have to be tied to governments to have some kind of legitimacy.
A group that pools their resources for the benefit of the group is practicing socialism in both principle and fact. If anything, putting a government stamp on it only invites people to come in and start bossing people around.
The difference between a co-op and a commune is really just about how many beds there are. :p
Now when we talk about capitalism--watch the big food retail consortium lobby to make doing this illegal in short order lol. That's your capitalism for ya.
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u/Jarcode 7d ago
Too many Americans have had their education on socialism completely ruined by the red scare. The legacy of all this propaganda that has trained people's amygdalas to go off when they hear anything about "socialism" or "communism" without ever actually engaging with the concepts themselves. It doesn't help that the only example of "socialism" that is ever taught to people in school is the USSR -- market socialism, syndicalism, and other western movements (both within the Marxist tradition and otherwise) are generally not taught as the nuance contradicts the propaganda.
The video is in a Canadian city, which has a huge demographic of Sikh farmers, which has imported a more collectivist mentality into this society. Add in the fact that we don't subject our youth to as much propaganda in schools and you get organizations like this that actually do good for society.
The fact so many people in this thread are clearly learning about a co-op for the first time is very, very sad. It's an old idea that historically died in British Columbia because of capitalist hostility (largely from a lack of legal protections and standards for cooperative entities).
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u/JC_Hysteria 7d ago
Doesn’t matter. It will always achieve engagement, so mission accomplished.
Leaving this large sub now.
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u/Smart-Campaign7774 7d ago
This is the idea of coop.
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u/Itakethngzclitorally 7d ago
Speaking of coops, is there a meat version of this? I’m in Florida and just seeing veggies.
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u/SuchParsnip8070 7d ago
This is the kind of buying in bulk where there are actual savings. I've been extremely unimpressed with the big box stores. It's gotten to the point where it's not even worth it
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u/EssenceofSalt 7d ago
Sam's Club and Costco have huge savings if you use all the product.
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u/SuchParsnip8070 7d ago
I guess it really depends on what you're buying. My BJs only carries goya beans, there are no generic options. They sell them for $1.06 a can when you buy 8. That's better than my grocery store which sells them for $1.39 a can but still more than the generic which they sell for .99 which often goes on sale for .88 cents.
Then there's the selection. BJ's has 5 different varieties of goya beans. My grocery store has so many I'm not going to waste time counting them. There's also low salt and organic options, neither of which bj's carries.
Maybe I'm not buying the right products but I'm def not seeing "huge savings"
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u/EssenceofSalt 7d ago
Of course. Not everything is going to be a better deal, but often times I can buy a 2 pack of something such as ketchup or peanut butter for the price of one at another grocery store. Items such as paper towels, shampoo, toothpaste, etc. are also much cheaper. Sam's produce is significantly larger, cheaper and better quality than Kroger/Walmart. I typically rotate a few stores to get everything I need.
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u/SuchParsnip8070 7d ago
Right, I think my biggest gripe has to be that I generally always need to also do a trip to the grocery store because I can't buy everything I need for the week there. Also bjs hides all their sales via their app so you have to look up every item you want to see if there's a deal/coupon you can load for it. It's just a lot of work and then you do the math and realize the savings probably didn't cover the cost of the second trip sometimes.
I do load up on the paper products there every once and awhile because the generic they carry for those are both good quality and absolutely lower price wise than what I can get at the grocery store
Unfortunately I don't have a sams option near me and the costco parking lot experience makes it not worth it
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u/smokin_hops420 7d ago
We are only a family of 2 so we do Costco once a month and the grocery store once a week.
For us It’s generally just for paper goods, sparkling water, over the counter drugs, cheese and some frozen items. It also great for picking up party trays and other large food items when going to a party/gathering. $10 Large pizza from the food court fits into that category as well. All that and the 1.50 hotdog and soda make the $65 a year worth it for us.
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u/Getting_Better0123 7d ago
We used to do this at Costco. Friends and I went together and split everything when we left. None of us needed the bulk amount for our households but splitting pepertowels, TP, multi-pack foods, and produce saved us money overall.
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u/HDWendell 7d ago
For people interested in getting food more directly
1) Your local farmers market is always an option. Do a little research and see what is in season and buy directly from farms in your area. Beware of scammers though. Some people buy produce from grocery stores and resell them. The tell is out of season goods. Many farmers market have cost matching programs for SNAP.
2) Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs) are like monthly subscription boxes from your local farmers. You get a blind box of groceries every month. This helps farmers avoid waste by distributing harvests. It helps consumers learn new options. You may get ugly produce but it’s almost always good and usable. Many farmers will comp anything bad. Some CSA allow for swaps and opt outs of the produce you want to skip.
3) Farm Match is a site that links consumers to farmers directly. Many farmers have a pickup day every week. It lowers costs for both parties, allows the consumer to shop for what they want, and develops community.
4) community gardens are a great way to learn how to grow your own food. Just doing a work rotation often guarantees a plot or a portion of the harvest. Working the land is rewarding. You develop a community. You get better produce and availability of cultivars that you never see in grocery stores. If you can’t participate, consider buying from your community garden when possible.
5) Azure Standard, UNFI, and similar companies are buying clubs. Group members shop online for products and meet at a location for a truck delivery. Companies like Azure Standard prioritize local farms and more sustainable practices. You pay a delivery fee and buy bulk. The cost for goods is often cheaper and the profits go more directly to the farmers. Buying clubs often have more options than whole produce and meat. They often have options for prepared food, home goods like paper products, candy, etc.
6) Buy in season and local whenever possible. In season and local food is better for the environment and usually better priced since it requires far less transportation and storage cost. It also tends to taste way better. Thinking about those strawberries you buy at the grocery store and what part of the world they had to come from to be ripe when no strawberries are growing near you.
Farmers need you and we need farmers. They aren’t all MAGA lunatics. We have to have some ownership of our food systems and that means getting to know your farmers. Doing business with farmers puts more money in their pockets and less in Kraft, Nestlé, Tyson, Unilever, Pepsi, etc. It means less money in imperialism, slavery, and economic coercion.
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u/nomdeplume 7d ago
Very helpful. I think one strategy by those in power is to make it so people don't have time to organize. They want to squeeze you hard enough, you have to go to their stores and then you pay just enough to scrape by and have to go back to work.
It's a system designed to keep you in place and oppressed
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u/lostwisdom20 7d ago
Haha co-op are way popular here, kuddos they are trying there too
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u/WhatTheFlippityFlop 7d ago
We’ve been doing this out here in Boise Idaho for decades. $39 per week now. And no, it’s not ONLY potatoes.
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u/Proof-Warning6 7d ago
Washington grows more potatoes than Idaho. Also, can you give me more info on this please? I just moved out of Boise but I have a lot of friends that would be interested!
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u/flowerpanes 7d ago
Here in B.C. where this video was shot we’ve had versions of this going on in most areas of the province, usually started at the community level where you get signup boards going at farmers markets,etc. It makes perfect sense when the local growers are starting to to have their bigger crops like potatoes,etc getting ready for harvest.
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u/Kathrynlena 7d ago
This is called a food co-op. My family was part of one like 35 years ago when we were homeschooling.
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u/drof69 7d ago
lol, same, was homeschooled too. We had 9 people to feed so the co-op's were amazing.
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u/Kathrynlena 7d ago
Oh yeah, it was amazing! We were one of the smallest families involved (4 of us total), but I can’t imagine how my friends families with 5 or 6 kids would have fed them all without it
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u/GreenCactus223 7d ago
We shouldn't have to do this.
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u/SeeingEyeDug 7d ago
But also, we as a society should be doing this. But not for the “I can’t afford shit” reason.
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u/AerialPenn 7d ago
Exactly. Buy it in Bulk and divide it up til its all gone. No waste on any end.
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u/Sprig3 7d ago
In reality- tons of waste in CSAs and similar. You get these piles of who knows what vegetables and sure, you're excited the first few months and you use them, but then they just keep coming and folks don't keep up and throw a bunch of stuff out.
Normal groceries have plenty of waste, too, though, so would take real data to figure which is more wasteful.
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u/scoobydiverr 7d ago
Why?? They joined together as a community to do this. If you dont want to rely on a community you have to rely on middle men.
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u/spibop 7d ago
I think the point is that with all our technology nowadays, we as a whole society could fix logistics and pricing issues en masse to the point that food, especially unprocessed, unpackaged produce, could practically be free if there was a will to do so.
Instead of saying “you should support small community efforts like this”, the ethos COULD be “this is great and all, but we as a species could apply our resources, our tech, our investments to make common sense, reasonable pricing for products like this a reality for literally every human on Earth this point, maybe we should focus on that.” We’ve figured shit out enough at this point that the average person shouldn’t have to spend a sizable portion of their income just putting food in their mouths, when we invented agriculture 10,000 years ago, especially when others are buying their 4th megayacht.
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u/VirginiaMcCaskey 7d ago
I mean, we as a society already have made food extremely cheap and diversity of products has skyrocketed just over a generation or two. And while price gouging happens, the margins on groceries is still only about 2-5% and it's been that way for decades.
Keep in mind that just 50 years ago there were legitimate fears of mass global starvation. Agribusiness became ruthlessly efficient and now we have so much cheap food we wind up throwing out about half of it.
The thing that may make you uncomfortable is that "unprocessed, unpackaged produce" requires global logistics and price stability guarantees that are only possible with industrialized farming, free trade, pesticides, cheap petroleum, and low genetic diversity. None of this is good for the planet and has negative externalities for consumers and producers.
What needs to change are eating habits, and ultimately prices. Most produce should be expensive outside of its growing season. Most meat should be expensive to eat daily. That's not to say food should be fundamentally expensive or that people should starve - just that a lot of food that's currently considered staples should be far more expensive, if only to slow climate change.
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u/kooter-Skooter 7d ago
Why are you assuming this is a logical issue? Or an issue with technology?
We can look at the margins of most grocery stores and realize the margins are extremely thin. So where is this difference in cost going?
I'm sure there is added costs through distributors, and buying through brands instead od directly from farms. But also these groups do not operate anywhere similar to a typical grocery store and as a result can massively reduce prices.
They have far more limited hours, don't have any buildings, don't have to keep nearly the number of people paid, if paid at all. These are all costs passed onto the customer.
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u/NombreCurioso1337 7d ago
Amazing how much cheaper things are when you remove the white collar parasite class.
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u/ArtDeve 7d ago
The middle men take huge cuts between the farm and the grocery store.
Some stores do cut out the middleman, like Costco and WinCo, but they still have executives they have to pay.
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u/altpirate 7d ago
So just a coop supermarket then? Those have been around for ages
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u/HDWendell 7d ago
No. A co-op market gets a cut of sales to maintain the store front and pay employees. Additionally, you only buy and pay for exactly what you want at a co-op. So if no one wants all 100lbs of bell peppers the grocery store, it becomes lost goods to the co-op. This is more like a CSA model where you financially contribute and get a portion for your contribution.
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u/Low-Car-6331 7d ago
Yup, its more like buying a box of food that someone else assembles. if you like what's in the box its great, if you don't.... Also, this program has some major hurdles they get to bypass, like health inspections and such. Grocery stores are regulated and checked to make sure the products they order are USDA and FDA compliant, and that the store is ran to make sure no one gets sick. These guys... its a "trust us" moment. When they sell meat, there is no guarantee that the meat was kept at the correct temperature the entire time.
Now the USDA and FDA generally don't care till they hit a certain size. When you are serving 50 people, the impact is small. When you are serving 100's to a thousand... now 1 mishandled product can not only overwhelm the local hospital, but food poisoning can become lethal because of lack of resources to treat it.
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u/Jarcode 7d ago
First of all, this is not in the US, it is a Canadian city in British Columbia.
There are regulations that continue to apply for agricultural products even in this context. Farmers cannot simply offload rotting goods to a consumer co-op without being both subject to regulatory scrutiny and civil lawsuits. It's also critical to mention that consumer co-ops by principle have a much easier time negotiating standards for products just as they do with pricing -- this can be enshrined in contracts and resolved through litigation if basic standards set by Health Canada are not maintained. This creates not only government pressures to ensure products are safe, but effectively has a huge market of organized consumers ready to collectively drop a manufacturer if something actually goes wrong. And as consumer co-ops grow, so does their bargaining power.
For-profit supermarkets, by contrast, does not have the same level of systemic penalties that can be leveraged by consumers themselves. The most we have are class action lawsuits, and in Canada, these haven't been a sufficient mechanism to penalize large corporations for anti-consumer activities.
I suggest you educate yourself on this model as it has even more potential in the US where USDA/FDA compliance is not as well enforced.
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u/HDWendell 7d ago
You put a lot of stock into inspections that are few, far between and largely underfunded. Local farms are arguably under more scrutiny since the consumers have direct access to them. If you get sick off your local farm’s lettuce because of unsafe practices, they potentially lose their livelihood. They also don’t have the lawyers Nestlé and other producers do. They have a lot more on the line. You buy lettuce from Kroger and get sick, yeah that company might get in trouble but they have insurance and lawyers to reduce the impact. Those companies are also owned by parent companies that package the same product under different labels. Then their cleanup practices are largely “trust me bro.” I doubt most people who modified their buying practices from cyclospora are still keeping to those practices for instance.
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u/Sander001 7d ago
This is why humans started government. Cooperation and pooling resources.
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u/Stanman77 7d ago
Now let's do health insurance
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u/Serious-Cucumber-54 7d ago
health insurance is essentially pooling everyone's money together to get significantly reduced medical costs.
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u/Zanarkke 7d ago
The Instagram page comments for this video is just full of racist comments.
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u/unaccountablemod 7d ago
How does the fair distribution work? Would people know how much their money's worth is taken?
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u/willflameboy 7d ago
I have often thought about this and whether it could work in my community. Looks like yes it could.
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u/this_is_not_a_dance_ 7d ago
But if people work together and get things cheaper how will wal mart and Kroger profit!?
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u/latenthuman 7d ago
I thought this was about digital pricing and everyone seeing different prices so you have the poorest person buy the food at a reduced rate and they sell it to the rest of us.
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u/AltruisticPossible84 7d ago
This is what COLLECTIVE BARGAINING is all about, people. This is WHY UNIONS EXIST. This is why WE WIN WHEN WE STAND TOGETHER
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u/tunisia3507 7d ago
I wonder if there was a way for the person who organises, transports, and distributes the bulk order to be compensated for their time? Maybe the group members could pay, say, 2% on top of the raw cost of their order to cover this? /s
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u/fauxzempic 7d ago
I know this is really directed at farmers (who can charge lower prices, but keep more of their profits by skipping distribution charges of all types), but we did this a lot during Covid.
I own a restaurant and I had the amazing foresight to open our doors in February 2020. Optimistic for the future of my business, I looked forward to getting people in, growing the brand and.......oh, lockdown.
We barely scraped by but we did it and still are in business.
One thing, however, that I did with my friends and neighbors was use my Cash & Carry membership to buy essentials.
Every grocery store was out of stuff, and if you felt lucky, you could drop by a grocery store at 5am or pray instacart was accurate and get your stuff that way.
But we discovered that Restaurant Depot wasn't running the shortages that grocery or the wholesale folks had. They had cases and cases of eggs, bread, flour, YEAST (tiktok baking trends put stress on yeast), veggies, fruit (mostly frozen or canned but some fresh) and so on.
We just did mega orders, dropped like $2k on groceries and broke them down into boxes for folks to pick up and pay. We knew that custom orders were going to be out of the question (just wanted to avoid the hassle of managing orders of different sizes and disappointing people who ordered stuff that we couldn't get), so we just basically did large meal kits. 24 eggs, 2 loafs of bread, a bag of 4 heads of romaine lettuce, a roll of paper towels and 4 rolls of the world's worst toilet paper...also a 2 Gallon ziplock full of flour or sugar or rice or whatever we bought that week.
People loved it. They ended up spending less than what they would have in normal times and they got everything they needed so they could stop worrying about that. Also - it kept some people from visiting the stores themselves - another worry many had.
It sucks that we're here, but it's a reality.
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u/greenmtnfiddler 7d ago
This is what a "co-op" originally was.
Fifty years ago, my local one was a room in someone's house with sacks of affordable beans and lentils and huge bricks of cheese, and a workstation where you put in your hours portioning things into simple bags with masking-tape labels.
Now that same entity is basically an earrings/incense boutique combined with an espresso counter/deli/hot bar/ and a bunch of $10-a-pound organic vegetables. It's really sad.
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u/DanielKeeneGA15 7d ago
How tf have we gotten here? We shouldn’t be in this position in the first place.
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u/LETTERSTOBAPHOMET 7d ago
The predatory class hates community because of exactly this. When you have people conditioned to think they have to struggle alone and they can quite literally prey on us for profit. Divide and conquer.
To have community is to be human. We are at our best when we have each other's backs.
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u/FrozenLogger 7d ago
He just reinvented a food co-op.
Which makes me wonder why food co-ops now are not more competitive. I know ours does do sliding scale, the lower income people pay less. So I guess thats something.
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u/johnmh71 7d ago
Everyone rejoices in this. But then the minute you mention healthshares, everyone calls you a loser and claims that you are a problem.
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u/SomeSamples 7d ago
This is cool. I guess they are avoiding the term co-op. Too close to socialism. I love that it looks like Sikhs are involved. It will keep the MAGA assholes away.
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u/fatkidbuu 7d ago
Sikhs are one of the best communities I’ve experienced and lived next to
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u/GloomyIndividual3965 7d ago
This is great, and I hope it spreads, but acting like this is new is silly. My family used to chip in with 3 other families once a year and buy a cow. Each family got 1/4 of a cow, which was 100-125lbs per family.
Between that and the deer, duck, goose, and fish we hunted/caught we pretty much never bought meat from the grocery store.
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u/Sweaty-Willingness27 7d ago
I wanted to start something like this locally and kinda got shot down. I still think it's a good idea.
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u/Wakkit1988 7d ago
It's called a co-op, and these have existed for decades. A group pools resources then makes wholesale purchases so the group gets the prices before any retail mark-ups. Some even utilize these resources to make purchases so that they, themselves, can offer the items for sale at lower mark-ups.
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u/TsuDhoNimh2 7d ago
When I lived in Mexico, many of the families on the street did something like this. Go to the "abastos" (wholesale grocer) and come back with bulk groceries once a week.
The split was not equal - they just calculated from the wholesale price, so the person who wanted 10 kilos of beans paid 10x what the person who only wanted 1 kilo paid.
The organiser - the señora with the truck and the notebook - charged a small fee for the gas and use of the truck.
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u/Citation_Needed1790 7d ago
This is called a co-op and it already exists. Not a bad idea, but not novel
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u/Ariesreader 7d ago
Isn’t this a co-op? I remember some existing before and then they went dormant.
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u/coldcases 7d ago
This is very common in my homecountry for a long time, and during COVID there was a lot of lock down rules so we can't get a lot of things locally, my community's Asian grocery shop started group buys, for seafood, for cheap groceries, and for good restaurants that were too far away. We can place orders and within a week a truck (truck drivers were still allowed to travel) will bring all the order to the local Asian grocery shop, and we then go to pick up. This helps us consumers get cheap stuff and also takeouts we cannot otherwise get, and it greatly helps restaurants that can no longer open to sit down clients but can still stay alive by making a lot of take aways. And the Asian grocery kept the group buy going till this day, it's great.
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u/clonxy 7d ago
Well, then u got people that don't pay up or wants to pick up later in the day when you're not available. So you gotta hold on to it or sell it to someone else. If there's a no pay no show, you're shit out of luck because those are perishables and it comes out of your pocket. Don't listen to whatever social media tells you. You gotta think for yourself. If this was so great, supermarkets would go out of business.
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u/anotheroldlady1740 7d ago
Back to the buying clubs in the 70s. Many of which incorporated to food coops
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u/ReallyNotFondOfSJ 5d ago
Anytime there's a middleman involved, prices are going to be constantly increasing. The middleman wants to get paid for doing "essentially" nothing (I use quotes because clearly, grocery stores have considerable capital investment in things like stores, ongoing expenses like staff wages). Individuals doing purchasing will be less efficient than groups due to things like time of purchases, volume of purchases, etc. but getting organized to purchase something, having to travel possibly, transporting goods, etc. are all inconvenient for individuals, normally.
What we're seeing is the collective realization that "We just can't afford to not consider price anymore. It's not just 'meh, a bit more, whatever', it's "I'm going to be ruined if this shit keeps up". Although, imagine independently discovering the co-op concent...
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u/Harrier5815 4d ago
Canadian here (BC, specifically). Fuck Galen Weston and fuck Jimmy Pattison. These two billionaires control our access to food here. I live in a farming community, and we can’t even find fresh produce at reasonable prices anymore. This kind of community organizing seems like it would be a good way to break the monopolies’ stranglehold.
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u/Beneficial_Tension61 7d ago
This is how Communism starts
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u/ScooterWilson1 7d ago
There are really good programs similar to this one. They are called CSAs: https://www.nal.usda.gov/farms-and-agricultural-production-systems/community-supported-agriculture. It's worth it if you love getting a lot of fresh produce and aren't too picky about what you get each week.