In February of 1970 West Bank (Minneapolis, Minnesota) resident Debbie Shroyer
traveled to San Francisco, California to visit David Krall, who was sharing an
apartment with fellow West Bankers Susi Shroyer, Keith Ruona, and Eddie Felien.
While in San Francisco Shroyer's friends took her to a small, local bulk foods
cooperative store. Later that summer Shroyer returned to the West Bank and soon
after 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
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, using one of the buzz words of the
time, and within a few weeks word spread around the neighborhood and it gained
popularity. The initial 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. That summer the Shroyer sisters (Debbie,
Jeanni, Vickie, and Susi) along with Szostek ran the store with the help of a
handful of volunteers. As the pantry grew in popularity and volume, Shroyer
envisioned stores where the work and effort were shared by many. Moreover, the
stores were to be controlled by their workers and would be neighborhood based. Each
neighborhood would have its own community store. Shroyer, a strong force behind the
beginnings of the co-op movement, 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 temporarily move to
the newly opened People's Center in what had been a Presbyterian Church. The
People's Pantry stayed in the People's Center for only a few months. In winter 1971
an inspector from the Health Department issued a warning to the People's Pantry and
told the pantry it would have to stop selling food out of the People's Center. The
pantry's organizers did not heed the warning and soon after the pantry was fined $25
and was ordered to close. The pantry then quickly moved to another temporary
location in the back room of Liberty House, the building in which Eddie Felien's
underground newspaperHundred Flowers was being
published, on the corner of 6th Street and Cedar Avenue.
As the pantry had proven itself a viable part of the community and clearly needed a
permanent home Shroyer, Dean Zimmerperson, Ralph and Ginny Wittcoff, and others in
the West Bank community developed a plan to create a store that was completely run
and owned by workers and volunteers. In searching for a storefront they connected
with Thomas Quinn and Roman Iwachiw, who had been negotiating with Augsburg College
administrators since March 1970 in an effort to rent a former Fairway storefront at
2129 Riverside Avenue owned by the college. The administration was not interested in
renting to a community-run store on the grounds that it was economically infeasible.
Unable to secure the Riverside Avenue space, Quinn and Iwachiw's community store,
True Grits, opened in the Loring Park neighborhood and operated from June to
September 1970. By October 1970 the Augsburg students began to take an interest in
the idea of a community store and began to pressure the administration to rent the
storefront. The Augsburg administration insisted that there be cash assets,
community backing, and legal incorporation of the store before they would consider
renting. 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 they perceived as
low cash assets, Augsburg agreed to rent the storefront 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. North Country Co-op's business grew and as other co-ops opened, they acted
as a warehouse and purchasing agent for start-up co-ops. In the next couple of years
cooperatives opened around the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area. 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 Co-op's resources and the function 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).
1975-1976 brought the turmoil of the "co-op wars" to North Country Co-op. The Co-op
Organization (CO), a radical political group begun by individuals within the co-op
movement, began pushing a pro-communist, pro-revolutionary agenda. The CO touted
that "middle class hippies" were not able to understand or address the "working
class plight" and that co-op organizers were "social elitists." The CO 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 hippie
counter-culture. They also claimed that the co-op community was too disorganized to
be effective in pursing this social-political struggle. The CO's membership was
strongest at the Beanery Co-op (Minneapolis) and People's Warehouse (Minneapolis)
but it had members in many co-ops around the metropolitan area and through these
members tried to push their political agenda on the management of the co-ops. The CO
not only tried to undermine the food policies of the co-ops, but the cooperative
element as well, since they felt the members should not have to volunteer at the
storefront. Moreover, the CO wanted co-ops to discard their cooperative, democratic
management systems and replace them with democratic centralism under the CO's
direction. By 1975 the CO had seen moderate success in increasing its following, but
was hungry for control. The CO physically took over the People's Warehouse and tried
to occupy several storefronts. 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 of 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 demanded that CO members leave the store.
The "co-op wars" had a shattering effect on many co-ops, including North Country
Co-op. The violence, controversy, and intensity of the political rhetoric scared
away casual shoppers and divided the co-op movement between those who felt that a
co-op's purpose was to provide wholesome, natural food and those who felt that
co-ops should provide products that appeal to the "working class" at prices cheaper
than conventional supermarkets and at the same time deliver a message of revolution.
People who stayed within the movement became suspicious of radical politics,
preferring to keep the focus on food. At the same time, others had been forced to
reexamine what they were trying to do with the co-op, how the co-op was organized,
and who they wanted the co-op to serve. As North Country Co-op pulled itself
together after 1976 it reorganized its bookkeeping practices and revised its food
policy to include canned goods, white bread, and for a short time, refined white
sugar. The co-op maintained its collective management practices; decisions were
still to be made by consensus of store coordinators, volunteers, and involved
community members.
North Country Co-op weathered the crisis and remained a very key player in the co-op
movement. It was a core member of the newly founded All Co-op Assembly (ACA) which
was formed in 1975 as 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. North
Country Co-op was one of the first co-ops to boycott the CO-controlled People's
Warehouse and advocate for the creation of the Distributing Alliance of the
Northcountry Cooperatives (DANCe) warehouse to compete with the People's Warehouse.
North Country Co-op also founded an affiliated cooperative hardware store,
department store, and book store.
The recession of the early 1980s again caused North Country Co-op to reevaluate
itself. Again the question became "were we selling whole foods or a new economic
system? and how viable is that economic system?" Reevaluation led to further
examination of how decisions were made in the co-op. The worker collective at North
Country Co-op enrolled in a management class at Minneapolis Technical College. The
class proved helpful and led the co-op's leadership to understand that good
management practices did not necessarily eliminate the cooperative philosophy. North
Country Co-op began experimenting with advertising, reconsidered its product mix,
and took a hard look at its own management. As the consensus method had proven
itself cumbersome, especially in situations that needed quick action, the collective
rearranged its workload, dividing its members into teams with particular areas of
responsibility. Controversial or expensive matters were still to be brought to the
full collective and to the board of directors for consideration. In 1981 North
Country Co-op's food policy and mission underwent intense scrutiny by the
collective, the board, and the membership. Stuart Rosen proposed what became the
co-op's mission statement and its food policy. North Country had decided that its
main product and goal was the active promotion of economic democracy. As a food
store they would favor natural foods and products that contributed to sustaining the
environment and local economy.
In 1982 DANCe leadership approved a plan to give discounts to member co-ops based on
the volume of their purchases; the larger the purchase the larger the discount. The
intention was to give co-ops added incentive to buy products from DANCe rather than
from mainstream distributors. North Country Co-op's collective did not approve of
this plan because it effectively subsidized larger co-ops at the expense of smaller
ones. They had a dilemma; if they lowered the price on products purchased from
DANCe, they would undercut smaller co-ops. Yet if they maintained its prices their
customers would be paying more than they needed and the store would be undermining
its own mission. Their solution proved beneficial to the co-op movement as a whole.
The store would continue to sell DANCe products at the standard prices and the
income gained from the volume discount would be set aside in a special fund for
training or assistance to failing co-ops. From this the Training and Technical
Assistance Project was born and briefly run by collective member Jeff Nygaard. Soon
the project was administered by the ACA, and later by the North Country Development
Fund.
North Country Co-op continued to be collectively managed through the 1980s. However,
general membership meetings were not well attended and the agendas did not often
address significant issues on the operation of the store. The membership's main
avenue for input was through the collective, not the board. The board, in turn,
relied very heavily on the collective for its information about the co-op's status.
The issue of living up to its democratic ideals remained at the front of the
leadership's attention. The collective was restructured again in 1991-1992, placing
greater emphasis on the teams and reporting procedures. In 1992 the co-op's mission
statement was rewritten to emphasize the participatory nature of their democratic
ideals.
In the early 1990s the idea of co-op consolidation surfaced. The basic idea was to
consolidate the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area food cooperatives into one large
corporate body with many neighborhood components. All co-ops would be centrally
managed and purchasing and warehousing would be shared. Members of one co-op would
be members of all the co-ops. North Country Co-op opposed the consolidation proposal
from the beginning. Its leaders, membership, and shoppers were committed to
decentralized, neighborhood based co-ops. Only the Wedge Co-op (Minneapolis,
Minnesota), Lakewinds Natural Foods (Minnetonka, Minnesota), Mississippi Market
(Saint Paul, Minnesota), and Valley Co-op (Stillwater, Minnesota) entertained the
consolidation proposal seriously enough to bring it to a membership vote in
1993.
North Country Co-op continued to operate as a collectively-managed food co-op with a
worker-member base at 1929 S. Fifth Street, Minneapolis, until it closed on November
4, 2007 following decreased sales due inner-city expansion by Lund's and competition
from discount grocer Aldi's.
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Availability:
The collection is open for research use.
Preferred Citation:
[Indicate the cited item and/or series here]. North
Country Co-op Records. Minnesota Historical Society.
See the Chicago Manual of Style for additional
examples.
Accession Information:
Accession numbers: 13,626; 14,184; 14,393; 14,894; 15,557; 15,799; 16,210
Processing Information:
Processed by: Kathryn A. Johnson, October 1986, May 1990, May 1991, June 1993;
Lynn Leitte, July 2002; Shelby Edwards, February 2011
Processing and cataloging of this collection was supported with a Basic Project
grant awarded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission
(NHPRC).
Catalog ID number: 990017200370104294
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