True, but small businesses fail all the time for all kinds of reasons. Lack of core members is like the co-op equivalent of the trope where the original owner of a small business sells it to some idiot who makes awful decisions and it all goes down the tubes. It doesn’t really explain why for every 100+ traditional businesses that are started, only like 1 co-op is started (numbers made up, obviously, but it feels that way).

The loan part makes a lot of sense, much easier for a bank to deal with a single person rather than a whole cooperative. Funnily enough, the Cheeseboard and Arizmendi were the two co-ops I was thinking of when I made this post. I was just musing about how in the Bay Area practically every small business has all the trappings of progressive politics (the signs, inclusivity, supporting various causes) but so few actually put their money where there mouth is and organize into co-ops.

Did a self checkout recently at a store I’d never been to before. Went through pretty smooth, shoved receipt in my pocket, and then saw they had little security gates and a receipt scanner, so I had to fish out the crumpled paper from my pocket, fumble around trying to find the barcode thing, and of course it also had a random QR code that I tried to scan for like a minute until the security guard had to come over and help me. Luckily it wasn’t that busy, but if there had been someone waiting behind me it woulda been a nightmare.