Olsen, Kris (Kristoffer Edward), 1946-1998,

In the summer of 1970 Susie Shroyer returned to the West Bank (Minneapolis, Minn.) from San Francisco, California. After her return Shroyer had the idea of opening a bulk foods cooperative like the one she experienced in San Francisco. What she needed was space at little or no cost. Diane Lynn Szostek, who had met Shroyer while visiting mutual friend David Krall in San Francisco during February of 1970, and Alvin Odermann volunteered their back porch and basement as a storage and distribution area and the use of their truck to haul goods from suppliers to their home at 616 20th Avenue South, Minneapolis.

The enterprise was dubbed the People's Pantry. Within a few weeks word of the pantry spread around the neighborhood and it gained popularity. The intitial intent was not to operate a food buying club, but rather to maintain a stock and location where people could come and get what they needed at wholesale cost. In addition, the organizers of the pantry wanted to buy "natural food" at prices within their means. They were looking for economic and ideological independence from supermarket chain stores. As the pantry grew in popularity and volume, Shroyer envisoned stores where the work and effort were shared by many. The stores were to be neighborhood based and each neighborhood would have its own community store. Szostek began to write articles for Eddie Felien's underground newspaper Hundred Flowers to encourage other people to open their own neighborhood stores. Shroyer was also instrumental in the beginnings of the People's Company Bakery and People's Clothes cooperatives.

By fall 1970 Szostek and Odermann had asked the community to find another location for the People's Pantry and it was decided that the pantry would move to the newly opened People's Center, where it stayed for only a few months. In winter 1971 the pantry moved again to the back room of Liberty House, the building in which Hundred Flowers was being published, on the corner of 6th Street and Cedar Avenue. Pantry organizers, with the help of the Community Union, sold $2,000 of shares, received a $1,000 non-interest loan, recruited volunteers, and incorporated as the North Country Co-op. After some resistance because of what it perceived as low cash assets, Augsburg College agreed to rent the storefront at 2129 Riverside Avenue and North Country Co-op opened in April 1971.

The North Country Co-op and its volunteer base inspired others to open community co-ops. Cooperative stores quickly blossomed around the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area. North Country Co-op's business grew, and as other co-ops opened, they acted as a warehouse and purchasing agent for new co-ops. Among the early cooperatives were Selby Co-op (Saint Paul), Whole Foods Co-op (Minneapolis), Riverside Cafe (Minneapolis), People's Company Bakery (Minneapolis), and Seward Co-op (Minneapolis). Eventually the wholesale purchasing and storage needs of the local cooperatives outgrew North Country's resources and the funtion was split off to become the People's Warehouse. By 1975 there were twenty co-op stores in Minnesota; thirty if one counted co-ops in the area known loosely as the "Northcountry" (Minnesota, western Wisconsin, northern Iowa, eastern North Dakota, and eastern South Dakota).

A few issues have repeatedly plagued the "new wave" cooperatives movement. These are: wages and benefits for paid workers, the acceptability of reinvesting profit vs. the desirability of remaning profit-free, food policies revolving around unprocessed vs. processed foods, and a cooperative's role in larger political and economic agendas. Food policy and political agendas collided in the mid-1970s causing the co-op movement to polarize. Everyone agreed that the co-ops existed to serve "the community" or "the people;" the arguments were over which community, which people, and in what manner co-ops should serve. For some co-ops, their community was geographically defined; for some co-ops their community was only those shoppers interested in organic or whole foods; other co-ops focused on using food and the storefront for promoting social change, activism, and emphasis of the "working class plight." Some individuals in the co-op movement began concentrating on politics, particularly on Marxism-Leninism. This group evolved into the Co-op Organization (CO). Members of the CO, some of whom were organizers of the first co-ops, criticized the co-op movement for being unaware of class conflict and having settled into a "cultist contentment with selling pure food." They felt that the co-op community must turn toward a sustained anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist struggle led by the working class, not by the "hippy counter-culture." The CO also claimed that the co-op community was too disorganized to be effective in pursing this social-political struggle. The CO had members in many co-ops around the metropolitan area, however their membership was strongest at the Beanery Co-op (Minneapolis) and People's Warehouse (Minneapolis).

The conflict between the aims of the CO and the beliefs of other leaders in the co-op movement erupted in spring of 1975. The CO had adopted the structural principle of democratic centralism and a philosphical alliance with the "working class." Representatives of the CO came to the Policy Review Board (PRB) of the People's Warehouse, an entity that was governed by representatives from purchasing storefront co-ops, with a plan for restructuring the warehouse according to their formulation of democratic centralism. Because the PRB was the only means through which all co-ops met and communicated about policy and problems, restructuring the warehouse would cause a ripple of restructuring throughout the co-op movement. In addition, their proposal broadened the food policy of the warehouse to allow canned foods, refined sugar products, and white flour products. The CO claimed that this change would widen the appeal of co-ops to the "working class." The PRB rejected the proposal, though a few members felt that some changes to the food policy were a good idea.

In response, the CO broke into and occupied the warehouse on the evening of May 5, 1975, announcing that they acted on behalf of the "working class." The CO attempted to seize the assets of the warehouse and succeeded in gaining control of the facility and products. However, in a quick action the majority of PRB voted the PRB members involved in the takeover off the board. This wrested access to the accounts away from the CO. Seward Co-op, North Country Co-op, and several others declared a boycott of the People's Warehouse and set up an ad hoc trucking agency to fill the role of the warehouse. Many co-ops followed suit. The Riverside Cafe, Our Daily Bread Bakery (Saint Paul), and Selby Co-op were largely allies of the CO and did not boycott the warehouse. Some co-ops, such as Powderhorn Co-op (Minneapolis), made attempts to mediate between the CO and the PRB. Individual members of the co-op community chose sides along the philosphical and political rift. Mill City Cooperative Foods (Minneapolis), Powderhorn Co-op, North Country Co-op, and the newly opened Bryant-Central Co-op (Minneapolis) had deep divisions of opinion within their membership.

Over the summer of 1975 the situation cooled, though the boycott was still observed by several large co-ops. A new co-op association, without the link to a particular store or warehouse, called the All Co-op Assembly (ACA) was formed to fill the role of the PRB. In fall 1975 a new warehouse was created to compete with the People's Warehouse and sell to those stores still upholding the boycott. The new warehouse was established as the Distributing Alliance of the Northcountry Cooperatives (DANCe). By winter 1975 the DANCe warehouse and the boycott had taken a toll on the resources of the CO and the People's Warehouse. The CO again began to openly criticize other co-op leaders, the new warehouse, and the integrity of the whole foods movement. Soon after the criticism started the CO attempted to use its members within co-ops to effect changes to the management--either a store's policies or its leaders.

Their efforts provided little success and in December 1975 the CO initiated a violent campaign to intimidate co-op membership and leaders. At Bryant-Central Co-op the coordinator who opposed the CO found his truck fire-bombed. On January 9, 1976 members of the CO assaulted and physically removed two workers from Seward Co-op and sent a contingent to march against Mill City Cooperative Foods in order to "claim it for the community." The co-op responded by calling on its own membership; approximately 200 people rallied to form a human blockade around the storefront to keep CO proponents out of the store. At North Country Co-op, six out of nine members of the leadership collective were part of the CO. These six railroaded a vote to lift the boycott on People's Warehouse. Their vote was overruled by a crowd of angry community residents and co-op members who stormed the store, installed a new cash register, and demaded that CO members leave the store. At Powderhorn Co-op, a storefront whose leadership was vested in the CO, non-CO co-op members staged their own break-in, changed the locks, and installed a new cash register, effectively negating the CO's control of the store. By summer 1976 the "co-op wars" were over. The ownership of the People's Warehouse had been returned to the Policy Review Board through court action. The assets were liquidated because the PRB had been effectively dissolved by the boycott and disagreements. The CO continued to operate several stores and one bakery but made no further attempts to influence others.

The "co-op wars" had a dehabilitating effect on many co-ops. Less involved members and casual shoppers were frightened away by all the controversy and violence. Many stores faced deteriorating memberships, low sales, and bankruptcy. People who stayed within the movement became suspicious of radical politics, preferring to keep the focus on food. At the same time, other people had been forced to reexamine what they were trying to do with the co-ops, how the co-ops were organized, and who they wanted the co-ops to serve. By the late 1970s the co-op movement revived and flourished. In 1981 the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area had twenty-seven food co-ops, three co-op restaurants, three co-op bakeries, six co-op warehouses, three formal child care co-ops, seven housing co-ops, eight theater and dance collectives, one worker-owned clothing store, one worker-owned hardware store, four cooperative contruction companies, one worker-owned print shop, one bicycle co-op, one electronics repair co-op, four co-op book stores, and one cooperative loan fund. Almost all of these were worker self-managed, though many had ill-defined channels for community input. The workers were still the first community a cooperative served; the outlying neighborhood came second.

The All Co-op Assembly (ACA), formed in 1975 as a response to the "co-op wars," was an alliance of co-ops who paid membership dues to belong. The agency never acted as a policy setting body for the storefronts; instead the ACA provided a forum for co-op people to talk with and learn from each other. The ACA put many of its resources into developing a network for anyone in the co-op movement, not just the store coordinators. It provided training, workshops on issues, and start-up assistance for new co-ops. The ACA took up publication of a monthly newspaper called Scoop to share news of interest to store coordinators. The recession of the early 1980s was hard on co-ops and on the ACA, since it relied on member dues for its income. As fewer and fewer co-ops survived, the resource pool of the ACA dropped. Under the leadership of Annie Young the ACA cut back its activities, focused on providing training and services for existing co-ops, and sought grants to replace its lost funding. Unfortunately, the ACA was at its most unstable at a time when co-ops most needed its help. Many people in the co-op movement resented ACA's inability to aid the co-ops it had helped found. Failing finances, low membership, and hard feelings led to the dissolution of the ACA in 1984.

The recession again caused co-ops to reevaluate their goals. Again the question became "were we selling whole foods or a new ecomonic system? and how viable is that economic system?" In order to stay finanically viable, many co-ops turned to a more capitalistic approach to managing their storefronts such as taking up advertising, in-store promotions, revamping food policies to add popular processed foods, and hiring experienced store managers. At the same time, the stores tried to keep the faith in their co-op roots, maintaining their member-worker base. Reevaluation led to futher examination of how decisions were made in co-ops and underscored the real and legally binding responsibilities of members of the boards of directors. As the boards realized they had serious responsiblities in the eyes of the law, the leaders had to sort out what level of democracy could be used for decision making in a storefront. Such decisions required setting policies outlining the authority and accountability of paid staff and the status of volunteer staff. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a number of co-ops chose to follow what has been called a "consumer base" rather than a member-worker base. In this scenario, members pay a large membership fee rather than purchase stock in the store. As the members are not owners or employees, they do not vote on policies or have an obligation to work in the store. Since ownership and labor are no longer prerequisites of membership, the store is run by paid employees, rather than member-workers. In addition, rather than discounts for member-workers a portion of the profit is returned to each member pro-rated by their volume of purchases. It was argued by some co-op leaders that this model is accessible to a broader range of people than the member-worker model. The premise is, essentially, that everyone needs to buy food; not everyone has time to work in the store.

In 1991 the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area had sixteen food co-ops, two co-op restaurants, one co-op bakery, two co-op warehouses, one child care co-op, two theater collectives, one cooperative construction company, one bicycle co-op, and one cooperative loan fund. At that time, only a handful were managed by worker collectives; the remainder had turned to a more streamlined, heirarchical structure. Even though there was a decline in the number of co-ops in the Twin Cities, the co-op movement is still viable and active in Minnesota. The movement has been plagued with controversy over politics, neighborhoods, pay, profit, capitalizations, and member involvement. Underneath these problems the movement is still engaged in a social dialogue about food issues: the quality of food, critique of industrial scale farming practices, federal agricultural policy, environmental degradation, and nutrition. The counter-culture of the 1960s, which laid the ground for the "new wave co-ops," affected the broader society's awareness of nutrition and food issues permanently.

Historical synopsis was compiled from information in this and related co-op collections.

From the guide to the Minnesota food cooperatives records., 1970-1998., (Minnesota Historical Society)