By Orly Keiner, TPSS Co-op Board President
At last month’s Shaping our Second Store event with co-op expert Jon Steinman, the room in the Takoma Park Community Center felt electric. Dozens of co-op members had come together to talk about the future of a business we all own together and there was a palpable sense of community and mutual care. As I left the event feeling inspired, I realized that our 45-year-old cooperative grocery store still feels so alive because it is based on something enduring and fundamental to the human experience – love.
Superficially, a co-op might look like other grocery stores. We carry a wide variety of healthy foods. We sell them to people in exchange for money. There are shopping carts, fridges, and freezers.
TPSS staff celebrate the store’s post-renovation reopening in 2024.
But scratch the surface and love shines through. In a world of endless corporate greed, environmental degradation, and staggering economic inequality, our community of member-owners believes deeply that our cooperatively-owned business should be conducted differently – based on love and respect for people and the planet.
We love and honor our workers by treating them with the dignity they deserve. When you spend your money at the TPSS Co-op instead of a conventional grocer, you are supporting the livelihoods of 45 members of our community, who are compensated fairly in our unionized workplace. We pay for 100% of health care premiums. Our wage and benefits package allows us to continue to benefit from our staff’s decades of experience and the genuine care they show for our community every day in the store.
Tracey A. Tucker, owner of BelieveN Bread, an organic, vegan, and gluten-free bakery in Silver Spring, MD, stocks bread and cookies at TPSS.
TPSS shows our love by carrying products from local farmers and producers that you’d never find in a conventional grocery store, because stores driven solely by a bottom line would never put in the hard work to manage hundreds of individual relationships with tiny suppliers. But our love for local is core to our mission. When you buy local products from 100 different vendors at the Co-op, your money benefits the human beings around you and nourishes our local sustainable food system, instead of bolstering the profits of far away corporate giants.
When a food co-op has been in a place for as long as we have, there is a risk of it feeling like just another part of the permanent landscape. It becomes possible to take its existence for granted. But like anything we love, a co-op needs care and attention. The board is caring for the Co-op by working to ensure it can thrive into the future. After years of exploring opening a second store, we are now moving forward with plans to do so, in dialogue with our membership. We are excited to share the cooperative grocery model and the love behind it with more people in our community and neighboring communities.