Dublin Food Co-op: What went wrong?

dublin | consumer issues | opinion/analysis Wednesday May 18, 2011 22:40 by Dave davecorcra at yahoo dot ie

After 28 years of operation, Dublin Food Co-op is chronically sick: divorced from its founding principles and acutely dysfunctional. Following a deeply troubling incident in March, this author – until recently one of its most committed volunteers – has found it necessary to part ways.

So, what’s gone wrong with the city’s pioneering consumer wholefood co-operative?

Dublin Food Co-op

After 28 years of operation, Dublin Food Co-op is chronically sick: divorced from its founding principles and acutely dysfunctional. Following a deeply troubling incident in March, this author – until recently one of its most committed volunteers – has found it necessary to part ways.

So, what’s gone wrong with the city’s pioneering consumer wholefood co-operative?

MISSION DRIFT

Back in 1983, a handful of peaceniks came together with a simple goal – to save money by purchasing collectively and in bulk. As the initial buying club transformed itself into a fledgling co-operative, it took on the costs of a member of staff and premises hire, thereby requiring a modest mark-up. Yet today, many of the Co-op’s core lines – like lentils and rice – can go onto the shelves with a whopping 58% added to the cost price paid. None of the stock, including a proliferation of highly processed foods, attracts a mark-up of less than 47%. Ballooning operating expenses have made a mockery of the original goal of providing members with affordable wholefoods. Furthermore, stock control processes are extremely weak and result in unnecessary wastage and additional costs that members must also shoulder.

Unable to offer keen pricing to those on limited incomes, in practice the Co-op’s prime appeal now lies with more affluent, pro-organic shoppers for whom price is not a key issue.

SQUARE PEG

As an alternative to hiring a community hall for weekly trading, the Co-op took on renting the majority of a large, disused warehouse in Newmarket Square in March 2007 at the height of the property boom. Rent alone now amounts to €7,700 per month after the acquisition of additional space for added flexibility. Yet the premises remain badly under-utilised. Moreover, despite remarkable volunteer efforts to adapt the site over the past four years, no possible configuration would allow for a goods inwards area that could receive deliveries adjacent to a sales area, making it fundamentally ill-suited to the co-op’s primary retail purpose.

Much reduced property prices should now open up a more appropriate and affordable relocation after the end of the current lease in December. Yet, the depletion of reserves to the tune of an astonishing €170,000 in pursuing and establishing full-time premises risks making this impossible.

MARKETIZATION

In the Co-op’s early years, membership was intended to mean something more than access to a discount in return for an annual fee. Welcome sessions for new members explained co-operative principles and attendance was expected. Today, these ‘Fáilte’ sessions persist but with a fraction of new sign-ups attending. Indeed, the very identity of the organisation as a co-operative, as distinct from a farmers’ market, has been obscured. The promotional literature that heralded the switch of premises in 2007 announced a ‘new market in Newmarket’. Far from being prominent, outward indications of the organisation’s co-operative nature and values have remained hard to find about the premises ever since. Instead, each weekend sees the Co-op’s main hall packed with stallholders and indistinguishable to many from a conventional market setting. The decision to hire out the premises for Dublin Flea Market and other independent Sunday markets, while pushed by the economic imperative of covering a high rent, has added further blurring while bringing with it very limited financial gain. Nor has the profile-raising potential for the Co-op of these events been well harnessed.

STALLHOLDERS ARISE

In theory, Producer Members who trade on Saturdays are just that: regular members who are also growers, bakers or producers of goods and services who provide something additional for other members and who contribute to the Co-op by passing over 10% of their turnover on each trading day. Initially, their addition was a way to ensure fresh produce was available without the attached risks of the Co-op itself buying in highly perishable stock. Yet a deep flaw lay behind this pragmatism. Few Producer Members arose from the ranks of the membership – they joined to trade and taking up membership was a required formality, not an active commitment. Understandably, they had businesses to run and trading at the co-op was only one of a number of outlets for many, especially with the increasingly proliferation of farmers’ markets. While these twenty-odd stallholders bring much colour and life to the Co-op, their interests differ radically from those of ordinary members. For many, trading at the Co-op represents a substantial part of their income stream – and one they have moved to defend by organising as a bloc, seeking to dictate terms and rebuff attempts to raise standards. In a consumer co-operative, this is truly a case of the tail wagging the dog.

A SECOND TAIL

Dublin Food Co-op trades on Thursdays, Saturdays and most Sundays (to coincide with the markets). However, Saturdays remain the only truly substantial trading day.

Almost all of the workload related to handling stock is undertaken by volunteers, with the staff primarily focused on checkout duties and other cash handling tasks, along with ordering and administrative support. Thus, for a maximum of 21 hours trading, 120 paid staff hours are allocated each week, shared amongst 9 part-time workers whose hourly rates range from €13.49 to €16.50. Book-keeping support is bought in at additional cost.

Unsurprisingly, salaries represent the Co-op’s primary overhead - yet an actual assessment of staffing needs has been glaringly absent in recent years. Instead, workers have been left to roster their own hours and are not required to submit timesheets. None have job descriptions and recruitment processes have been sorely lacking in both transparency and logic. Thus, in many key respects, consumers retain only a weak hold on the running of a co-operative that they they formally own.

INTO THE VOID

All of the above point in a single direction – that the Co-op has been short of clear-sighted and effective leadership amongst its board of member-directors, many of whom have lacked relevant experience or even a perception of the legal and practical responsibilities going into the role. Despite the presumption in the Co-op’s constitution that a paid ‘Co-ordinator’ head up and oversee the staff team, this position has been left vacant for several years, leaving the directors, as a body, to try and do the impossible. Similarly, the board has struggled under the weight of added responsibilities that accompany the running and upkeep of a large warehouse unit. Bogged down by minutae and hampered by division, the strategic role of the board has been crowded out and, too often, membership decisions at general meetings have been forgotten rather than followed through.

Instead of being strongly connected to other organisations and developing links in the local community, the Co-op has been introverted and aloof since its relocation to Newmarket and largely divorced from vital ideas around food sovereignty and sustainability. Even a limited living up to the ecological principles that might be expected, such as attentiveness to recycling and closely managing power consumption, have been conspicuous by their absence in Co-op culture.

Member-led efforts to bring the co-op back in the direction of its values – such as reassessment of products for ethical and ecological suitability and a re-energising of member engagement and volunteering – have been resisted by key staff and have too often lacked the emphatic support of the board. Thus, the potential of volunteer working groups has been severely hampered, despite their mandate from the membership.

FINAL STRAW

All of the above criticisms are ones I freely articulated and worked with others to try and address. Despite frustratingly slow progress, none of them were responsible for my decision to part ways. That came only when Dublin Food Co-op proved itself incapable of dealing with an issue that should have been utterly straightforward in an organisation born of the peace movement: violence. Quite simply, physical aggression and intimidation can have no place in a co-operative environment. A perpetrator must be immediately suspended and a process begun that provides for expulsion by the membership.

Yet I watched in horror as the co-op failed dismally in dealing with reports from two members of a serious incident committed by a stallholder before the start of trading. More than a month afterwards, he remained at large, normalised by inaction and utterly defiant. Meanwhile, the complainants - and others, like myself, who offered them support – were left to feel marginalised and increasingly uncomfortable within the walls of our own co-op.

April’s Annual General Meeting was ugly and peppered with vitriol. By its end, the Co-op’s dysfunction and vested interests were firmly embedded into the new board, snuffing out even the faint hope of a belated resolution.

For myself and others, our co-op was gone.

About the Author: Until April 2011, Dave Moore volunteered as Dublin Food Co-op’s web and eNewsletter editor, undertook membership administration and served on its Products Working Group. He is now focusing on other projects toward building alternative local food systems and can be contacted via davecorcra [at] yahoo.ie