Amazon bookstore will stay open, but loses its cooperative style

Amazon bookstore, a feminist institution in Minneapolis founded in 1970, was saved from a planned closure last week when longtime customer Ruta Skujins decided to buy the shop.

Although Amazon will remain open, the collective ownership of the store by the people who work there will end.

The Star Tribune gives one sentence about the loss of the cooperative and then leaps into analyzing the tough times for independent booksellers. As Minnpost reports, Skujins will reach into her background in the corporate world to make Amazon more marketable. In other words, rather than close, Amazon got a boss.

Certainly, it's better that Amazon remain open under traditional ownership structures than close. But in a year where we lost North Country Co-op, the 37-years old collectively run grocery, people in the co-op movement should be on high-alert.

Thirty years ago, Minneapolis was a mecca of cooperatives, and of people who envisioned a different way of working, without bosses or hierarchy. Grocery co-ops numbered about 30 in the mid-70s, according to Craig Cox in his book Storefront Revolution. One by one the co-ops went under, or changed to traditional management structures like the Wedge.

While the co-ops could be volatile and chaotic, they built a sense of community around them based on shared values and equally shared hardships, that traditional businesses, even independent ones, have difficulty doing.

Here's how the Seward Cafe, a cooperative restaurant on Franklin Avenue, explains its raison d'etre:

"It is the purpose of the collective owners of the Seward Community Cafe to create a work environment that fosters respect, equality, and mutual support between workers. The principles that guide our actions include: social and environmental responsibility, self-reliance, and cooperation."

The loss of these institutions, and of the belief that alternatives to traditional exploitive capitalism can be economically viable, is a quiet tragedy.

But not everything is gone, or doom and gloom. Still surviving are the Hard Times, Seward Cafe, the Hub bike shop, and Northland Poster Collective, as well as a couple others. And maybe something new will sprout up. It was, after all, in the wake of an epidemic of shuttered mom-and-pop groceries that the co-ops first found room to grow and develop. Could it be that the tough economic times we're currently seeing could provide similar room to experiment?

Funny enough, the conference of the National Federation of Worker Cooperatives ends today in still-ravaged New Orleans. The cooperative vision could be so powerful in a place infamous for its inequality, and for its deadly results. Maybe in this most feudal of all American situations, cooperatives can help rebuild, better and stronger and more just than before.