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When I was in grad school, I happened to walk into a certain used-clothes store in Pittsburgh. It wasn't your ordinary recyclery; it was, in fact, a little store put up by the little old ladies who supported the Pittsburgh Opera! So it was called the Operatunity Shop, and it contained the most unbelievable things for sale: things that these actually quite affluent little ladies owned at one time, and could not use any longer. (I bought myself a poorly-fitting tuxedo there, because I needed one in a hurry.)Among other things, there was a book called "Living better with Less", or words to that effect, by the legendary Studs Terkel. It had some of the most useful ideas I know, for living with suddenly smaller resources.
- Shop for cheaper cuts of chicken. The cheapest available chicken parts were chicken backs, which sold for roughly 19 cents a pound. Still, once you cooked these, you had enough to stave off the worst of your hunger.
- Put it where it shows. This was to suggest that the practice of wearing expensive underwear was a little silly. You wore fairly good clothes on the outside, and the least expensive undies you could find.
- When buying eggs, buy Large Eggs. He had done research, and concluded that the price of Large Eggs was the least for usable ounces of eggs. And check that they're not cracked.
- Grow your own veggies. Why not?
There were three prices labeled on each package (by hand!): wholesale price, price for members, and price for non-members. The stores were open to anyone, and you could get good food ---often better produce than you got at the supermarket--- for less money. In addition, they would use old egg cartons, so you could bring in your egg cartons, and recycle them as egg cartons. Today, of course, in most places egg cartons cannot be recycled at all.)
We bought a share of the local store for $5, and we had to put in 3 hours of work each month: labeling, cutting blocks of cheese, sorting eggs, shelving groceries, and, once you knew your way around, manning the counter. These were the most fun people around, and I loved being in the store, with all its fresh produce smells! It was on the poorer side of town (where rents were presumably lower), and across town, they had a warehouse in a sort of warehouse district.
We joined a Fresh Milk club within the cooperative; we would drive out once a week to the farm that supplied raw milk to us, and hauled it out to the home of the organizer, who saw to the distribution. We got a gallon a week, which we used with gusto. We evidently paid the farmer a lot more than Big Milk was willing to pay him, but he said the days of his farm were numbered. That may be true ---the poor gentleman has probably gone to the great cooperative in the sky--- but there is no reason that something similar could not be set up even today. (Big Milk obviously will not like this, but at the outset, a few dozen gallons of milk a week could not possibly make a difference to the volume that Big Milk demands. Once such a movement gains momentum, of course, Big Milk will be at pains to cramp its style.)
We walked. We took the bus everywhere, even in horrible weather. (I remember standing at a bus stop in Wilkinsburg in freezing weather, because we had missed the last direct bus out of the Mall. Our 3-month old baby was in a carrier on my back, singing a dreary song, and gnawing on my knitted cap. She could be taken anywhere, but she would declare her misery in a sort of chant.)
It is fashionable to despise hippies today, of course. Many hippies have not adjusted well to the 21st century, and some of us who have don't feel that comfortable with them. The Cooperative types were, of course, essentially hippies, but a lot better organized.
Organizing is the key word. Organizing has come to mean setting up a trade union, and of course, Big Business has taken brave efforts to demonize trade unions to the common people. Regardless of whether trade unions are despised for good cause, organizing Cooperatives should be a far less threatening thing. If a cooperative store is established in a town, it would compete directly with the health-food stores, and with the supermarkets. The closest thing to a store whose offerings approach the type and quality of Cooperative stores of the seventies is the chain Aldi, whose national headquarters are in Illinois, and whose international headquarters are, I believe, in Germany somewhere. Many of the shoppers in our local Aldi store appear to be small farmers, judging from their dress, and the contents of their shopping carts. Life has been hard for small farmers for a long time, and the present Economic Depression is just the rest of us catching up to the misery our agricultural friends have been experiencing already for a couple of decades. So, if we Organize, in the sense of banding together to get produce from neighborhood farms and retailing it ourselves, we would be helping ourselves as well as these farmers. Small farms use land more wisely and with less ecological destruction than do large farms, from everything I have read.
Note that Big Milk and Big Food (Kellogg, Proctor and Gamble, General Mills, ConAgra, to name a few) do employ many people, but nowhere near the number of people who lose their jobs because small farms have to close down.
In conclusion, if this depression/recession is many years in going away, we will sooner or later have to take steps to make the best of what there is, in terms of conserving our resources. (Banks will whine about people not going out and buying more, but you will notice that Banks are not spending much money, either. And they're charging more for each purchase with your credit card. Stores are not happy about the added per-purchase fees. One of these days, stores will publish two prices for everything: with a credit card, and without a credit card.) And the more options you've heard about, the better off you are.
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