Tagline: Karma’s first president reflects on its origins (from 2010)

Author: Richard Haney

Hello Karma Members,

I still have Karma Co-op Membership card #348 that was issued to me in 1972. I can easily remember the first days of organising, planning and then opening the doors of the old, empty “white elephant” warehouse at 344 Dupont St. Our first Karma Meeting was held in the furnace room because there was so little heat in the building! That first Meeting was jam-packed with enthusiasm, high hopes and a strong sense of empowerment. We were all very disenchanted with the proliferation of very large supermarkets at which a consumer was virtually irrelevant as a person. We had extensively canvassed the whole Annex to find out what folks wanted in their neighbourhood and we then formulated a business plan to reflect those ideas and hopes and Karma Co-op was born! The first three products that people wanted were: bulk crunchy peanut butter, inexpensive cat food and inexpensive toilet paper. The day the store opened we had all three proudly displayed!

Recently I have been reading the Karma Chronicle on-line and observing that the issues of co-op size and the concept of potential non-member co-op shoppers are back on the radar screen. I fully and strongly believe that there are two main reasons why Karma has successfully survived for almost forty years when many other co-ops in North America have failed:

a. Karma’s fairly strict adherence to the 1966 Version of the Toad Lane Six Rochdale Principles.

b. Keeping a close and sharp eye on the relationship between co-op membership size and staying near the break-even point financially. Our hope in those early days was that Karma Co-op would be a proto-type and would REPLICATE.

Jane Jacobs, the legendary urbanologist, was an active Karma Member and, influenced by her literary inspiration, many of us attempted to start a Karma Co-op II down in Cabbagetown. We knew that by keeping the size of each democratically-governed co-op reasonable and by co-operating with other fledgling co-ops we could probably “change the world” of environmentally-destructive consumerism. I, for one, still ARDENTLY believe in the Rochdale Principles!

When I lived in San Francisco I was a Member of the Consumers Cooperative of Berkeley (CCB). It was a resoundingly successful co-op which started in 1937 and lasted until approximately 1986…..Almost 50 years! I have researched the reasons why CCB went “belly-up”. It appears as though the two major reasons were that it got too big and successful and that it veered away “step-by-step” from democratic control. They had a technique called “patronage return” by which Members would get a yearly percentage of any profits proportional to their level of purchases. There became so many non-member shoppers that democratic governance became at best an illusion. For a good article on the closing of the CCB check out the article by Karen Zimbelman at Co-operative Grocer. The article is in Issue # 38, January-February, 1992.

Please be sure to invite me to the Fortieth Anniversary of Karma! AND to the Fiftieth Anniversary! Anyone who would like to chat with me about the early days of Karma is welcome to contact me.

With warm regards,

Richard M. Haney, Founding President of Karma Co-op