I'm on the board of the food coop here. It was a buyer's club until we got a generous, but modest loan from an anonymous donor.

We have a very small store and getting it up a going was a chore. We've been open for almost a year now and are doing okay.

No disrespect to our wonderful volunteers, but for the most part people don't care enough to commit any time to it.

As long as we can keep our overhead low and the Whole Foods down the road is still "delayed" we should be able to survive.

A retail store selling anything is a pretty challenging enterprise. Most of them are started by individuals, and most of them don't last for more than a year or so. You are right, there are a lot of things involved in setting them up and running a store.

Most food co-ops seem to thrive best where there is a certain "critical mass" of people that will patronize them. You are more likely to find that in big cities and in college towns than you are in small towns. To be safe, a buying club probably should continue operating as a buying club until they are well above the number of patrons needed to make a store work.

There are some intermediate steps that buying clubs could take. They could start renting someplace that is other than prime retail space but that has space for storage and processing and distributing orders. The days and times when food is available for pickup could be extended. Non-perishable items could be purchased in larger quantities, stored, and distributed over multiple months (with some arrangement made for enough funds to be built up to cover the inventory being carried). Buying clubs should try these smaller intermediate steps first before committing to taking the retail store plunge; if they have trouble making these little things work, then they certainly won't find that running a full retail operation is easier.

I think the best you can do is show them quotes/vids from the people who keep getting it right and what their current guesses are for the future.

Meredith Whitney - she has the most cred with regular folks, ie - not seen as a nut.

Peter Schiff - now seen as prescient, but people still think his future picks are wrong.

The Automatic Earth

And show them the graphs floating around with more mortgage resets coming the through 2011. Finally, the many articles on the expected, and in-progress crash in retail real estate.

That's all got!

Cheers

EDIT: Here's a nice piece via The Automatic Earth

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/right-to-rent-helping-hom_b_156...

Edit 2: This is the one you need: http://www.financialweek.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090112/REG/901...

Yes, buying commercial real estate right now would probably be a really bad move.

You could show this this from Calculated Risk:

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/01/retail-sales-collapse-in-decem...

With that sort of collapse, there will be lots more real estate available soon. If they buy now they are almost certainly going to take a significant loss.

PO issues relevant to a food co-op - a partial, off the top of my head, list:

- Transport of foodstuffs will eventually become more expensive, and may be subject to disruption. It is important that food co-ops actively seek out and patronize sources of supply for all goods that are located as close as possible. There may be a trade off between short-term cost savings and long-term food security (which could be achieved through long-term contracts with local suppliers); the patrons need to be educated and this issue needs to be discussed thoroughly.

- You might also give some thought to inventory management for food security. What if you can't get deliveries for items supplied from outside your local area for a month or two? What non-perishable but essential foodstuffs (like grains and legumes, for example) should be stocked and stored in larger quantities to assure that your patrons can still eat? What type of storage facilities might you need to build or acquire to store these larger quantities safe from rodents, insects, spoilage, theft?

- Energy to operate the food co-op building will eventually become more expensive. Electricity may become more unreliable and subject to increasingly frequent and prolongued blackouts. The food co-op might want to consider investing in DC-powered refrigerators and freezers, a battery bank, and rooftop solar panels to assure that losses of perishable stock are minimized. A passive solar heated store would be a wonderful long-term goal; at the very least, you might need to have a wood stove or two and lay in a supply of wood. You need to have a plan for operating without grid electricity for up to a week or more.

- How are your patrons going to get to the co-op to get their food? While some might live within walking distance, many will not. Motor fuel will become more expensive, and your area might experience supply disruptions lasting several weeks or more (as my area did this past September). You might want to give some thought to maintaining a good database of member contact records, and developing communications systems, so that you can develop one or more ways for members living near each other to link up and cooperate together to get to and from the co-op. Perhaps neighbors could take turns doing shopping for a group of neighbors, for example. Maybe there are other ways the co-op and its members could work together, perhaps in cooperation with local transport systems, to solve the transport system - research and discuss!

- The US is likely to be experiencing a very long period of economic decline. The good news is that this is likely to increase the number of people interested in becoming co-op patrons - IF the food co-op focuses on helping households to stretch their food budgets. You need to anticipate this growth in patronage and plan for it. The bad news is that more and more people are going to be experiencing severe economic difficulty. There will be people in your community that should be co-op members, and would greatly benefit from being co-op members, but can't afford the initial membership. You might want to consider raising donations for some sort of need-based grant program to cover these people. It is also likely that many patrons will have to cut back on their food budget. Expensive items that used to sell well might start sitting on the shelf, while you might find yourself wiped out of inexpensive but nourishing foods. You need to have a system to keep close track of changing purchase patterns, and be able to shift your stocking patterns quickly. You are also likely to have increasing numbers of patrons who no longer have enough money to buy what they need. What are you going to do about this? The time to think this through and decide what to do is before the problem gets too severe.

I can't find there an answer to my question?