Cub can and has built stores on a site as small as a hectare, or one old style square city block. Given the space needed for parking, loading dock, etc.. that's as small a size as you can practically build a grocery store. A new store must also be located on a designated truck route, so it pretty much has to be located on a main street. The vehicular traffic a grocery store generates also pretty much requires that it be located on a main street such as Central or Lowry. A new co-op would be wise to follow similar criteria in picking a location unless they plan to have a much smaller customer base and pay higher distribution costs.
Which begs the question- why is it that most of the opposition to Cub is coming from supporters of the promised Northeast food co-op? Northeast co-opers, you have good reason to fear Cub. Cub will carry much of same commodities as your co-op, and with their economies of scale they'll be able to run you right out of business... unless you develop a better business plan.
Just a stones throw from the end of the Floyd B. Olson Memorial Highway lies the town of Fairmount, North Dakota. The busiest, and just about only business, in Fairmount is the co-op. That co-op features a convience store, deli, pizza, fuels, car, truck, and machinery parts and repairs, a hardware store, seeds, farm chemicals, lubricants, etc.. They also provide planting and farm chemical application services. But Fairmount's co-op doesn't carry "natural" foods, in fact they don't carry a lot of foods other than milk, bread, and snacks at all.
Why? Because unlike our Northeast co-op the Fairmount co-op meets their community's needs instead of trying to dictate them. They don't carry a lot of groceries or clothes because Super Value's retailers and WalMart, etc.. can sell them for less within an hour's drive from Fairmount. But even Walmart doesn't fix tractor tires so the Fairmount co-op provides that and similar needed services for it's community.
So I would suggest that the Northeast co-op's organizers set aside the 60s counterculture model for their yuppie co-op and take a drive west on the Floyd B. Olson Memorial Highway. Stop at as many co-ops as possible and see why there succeeding. Then come back and listen to the communities needs. Instead of $3 a loaf bread, could we instead have useful stuff like hardware for century old houses? Ethnic food for our immigrants, even if not "natural"? And a silo full of bulk corn fuel for our furnaces and biodiesel at the pump?
hanging on in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.)
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