Recent comments in /f/CambridgeMA

smudgejudy t1_j2drt56 wrote

Reply to Donate cycling clothes? by tedsvo

I bet that someone on the Cambridge Buy Nothing group on Facebook would love those! These types of kits tend to be very popular there.

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wittgensteins-boat t1_j2dl02i wrote

Reply to comment by SpyCats in Central Square Business Closings/Neighborhood Changes by fire_walk_with_m3

No.
Food coops are forming regularly.

After pioneering access to hard to obtain foods, Food Coops, running from the 1960s and 1970s finally had well capitalized competition in the 1990s and onward.

  • You need capital and volume to succeed in the food business. And it helps to own the store, so that the coop is not subject to rising rent at the end of a lease. Real estate and buildings are costly. (Harvest Coop [a merger of the Boston Food Coop, and the Cambridge Food Coop] closed the Cambridge location in 2012, and the Jamaica Plain location in 2018, because of rent increases at the end of leases, and the potential cost of renovating a new location.)

  • There is now easy access to organic and natural foods at local stores:
    Stop and Shop, Shaws, DeMoulas Market Basket, and Whole Foods.
    And ethnic food stores are more common too, now. In 1970, you could get tofu only by going to a Japanese or Chinese restaurant that made their own tofu, or by making it yourself.

  • New England coops used to have their own cooperative warehouses, starting in the early 1970s, buying from wholesalers and importers in Boston and New York, and buying on the wholesale New England Produce Markets (NEPC) in Chelsea MA.
    New England Food Cooperative Organization, Inc. NEFCO, was in Cambridge. Also there were Regional food coop warehouses in Vermont, Maine and Western Massachusetts, that eventually effectively merged into NEFCO in the 1980s and 1990s, and NEFCO became Northeast Cooperatives.

  • United Natural Foods Incorporated, food distributors (UNFI) took over Northeast Cooperative's assets after Northeasts's financial crisis and insolvency in the 1990s That ended coop warehouses in New England.

  • There is a new revived northeastern multi-Coop purchasing association. Neighboring Food Co-op Association (NFCA) with New York and New England coops, about 45 coop store and pre-order coop members.
    Link at bottom.

  • There are local food coops forming all of the time.
    Assabet Coop in Maynard is opening soon in 2023, after having gathered about 2,000 members already, with the members raising capital for the new Coop.

References.

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