The C-W Co-op

Just like light shows and sideburns, the co-op idea is spreading from the alternate culture into straight society. Lynn Sherr reported on the trend in a recent Associated Press story:

"There's a grocery 'store' in a Brooklyn garage which scrimps on brown bags, charges two cents each for egg cartons and sells top quality sirloin for 98 cents a pound.

"At the chain supermarket three blocks away, brown bags and egg cartons are free, but sirloin costs $1.49 a pound.

"The 'store' is the Cuyler-Warren Consumer Buying Club - a food cooperative in a racially mixed area where shoppers claim to save up to 30 per cent a week on meat, eggs, fruit and vegetables."

The syndicated article goes on to say that New York Mayor John Lindsay's Commission on Inflation and Economic Welfare has praised the C-W co-op and recommended that the city encourage and assist similar food buying clubs.

Five housewives, under the direction of Mrs. Kittie Brown, organized the C-W co-op over a year ago in Gowanus, a hardcore poverty section of Brooklyn.

Mrs. Brown says, "I didn't know how bad conditions were in our neighborhood until, 1968, when I found some mangy-looking fruit surrounded by green flies in a local store. Then a friend and I discovered the wholesale food markets and bought a basket of really good tomatoes for a fraction of the neighborhood grocery's price. That did it! Five of us put up $5 each and, with the original $25, started buying and reselling peaches, stringbeans and tomatoes."

The co-op originally weighed all produce on a set of bathroom scales and sold it at night in a church kitchen. Now the garage store is open all day Friday and serves 67 members and a number of non-members who are permitted to shop without paying the co-op fee.