Storefront Revolution: Food Co-ops and the Counterculture

Abstract

In the 1960s, the cooperative networks of food stores, restaurants, bakeries, bookstores, and housing alternatives were part counterculture, part social experiment, part economic utopia, and part revolutionary political statement. The co-ops gave activists a place where they could both express themselves and accomplish at least some small-scale changes. By the mid-1970s, dozens of food co-ops and other consumer- and worker-owned enterprises were operating throughout the Twin Cities, and an alternative economic network--with a Peoples' Warehouse at its hub--was beginning to transform the economic landscape of the metropolitan Minneapolis-St. Paul area. However, these co-op activists could not always agree among themselves on their goals. Craig Cox, a journalist who was active in the co-op movement, here provides the first book to look at food co-ops during the 1960s and 1970s. He presents a dramatic story of hope and conflict within the Minneapolis network, one of the largest co-op structures in the country. His view from the front of the Co-op War that ensued between those who wanted personal liberation through the movement and those who wanted a working-class revolution challenges us to re-think possibilities for social and political change. Cox provides not a cynical portrait of sixties idealism, but a moving insight into an era when anything seemed possible. Craig Cox is editor of Business Ethics, a national bimonthly magazine that covers socially responsible business. He has written for a variety of local, regional, and national publications.