Circling In On The Hub City Co-Op

Around two weeks ago, a Spark reader named angelinaS posted a short, almost cryptic, message on our user forum. It read simply:

A friend and I are in the planning stages of forming a cooperative grocery store downtown. Anyone who is interested, take a look! If you aren’t on facebook, you can email us at hubcitycooperative@yahoo.com to receive more information!

To be honest, I was a little skeptical. Only a few weeks before, I had written about how nice it would be to have a small downtown, organic-leaning grocery store, and here someone was saying they were trying to put that exact kind of thing together. But that was in a mental exercise about the Spartanburg I’d like to see in five years, whereas this was being talked about in the here and now. It seemed to good to be true.

And yet, tonight, the first public meeting about the Hub City Co-op is taking place in the Barrett Room of the Spartanburg Library Headquarters. The Facebook group has hundreds of members. Some extremely influential members of the community are talking about the co-op, and its potential benefits to the community. There’s reason for skepticism until the doors actually open, I suppose, but it certainly looks like the project is coming together.

So, what is this co-op, and how did it come about?

“It sounds really hokey, but I had a dream about it,” founder Ashley Campbell tells me over coffee at Little River Roasting company. “When I have a really vivid dream that sticks with me, I tend to think about it and worry it for a little while. So, I started cruising around and looking at different spaces in the downtown area, thinking that this really could work, and that I could make it happen.”

A few weeks later, at a dinner party, she mentioned this dream to some friends. To her surprise, her friend Angelina Shuman — the angelinaS from the forum post — had been thinking about the same idea.

“Four days later, I found the space that I wanted and got a tour of it,” Campbell recalls. “I thought ‘This could really happen.’ So we started the Facebook page.”

That Facebook group — little more a placeholder for the idea, with almost no details — had gained over hundred of members within the first day. As of this writing, it has well over 300 members. Clearly, there is support for the idea in the community.

So, what is everyone so worked up about? What exactly is a co-op, and why should anyone get so excited about the idea of someone trying to open one downtown?

“A co-op is a member-based grocery store,” says Campbell. “Anybody can shop there, but when you become a member by paying a membership fee, it gives you some incentives.”

You may be thinking “That sounds like Sam’s Club,” but the idea is actually more about cost-sharing for specific kinds of products. It’s kind of like having roommates so you can split the cost of rent and utilities — or even groceries — only the cost you’re splitting is the bulk or wholesale price for food products that would be too expensive or impractical to special order on your own.

“Our co-op will be focusing on local produce and local products,” explains Campbell. “So, when you shop or buy a membership in this co-op, you’re helping to support a lot of things, like local farms.”

Campbell notes that while the store won’t be strictly local — it’ll have some snack foods like you’d expect from any small grocery — the focus will be to make as many locally sourced foods available as is practical. She notes that there are many local dairies, several local artisanal cheese makers, jam makers, honey makers, local meat producers and so forth. Providing a retail space for these items not only gives local shoppers new options, it also helps to grow the local economy by providing new outlets for a variety of local goods.

Take bread, for instance.

“We want to carry local bread,” says Campbell. “So, one of the things I’m going to be doing is asking people in the community, ‘Are you a professional baker? Do you want to be a professional baker? If you make it, we’ll sell it, as long as you have good quality and meet the requirements.’ If we can get two or three bakers lined up, and each one has a specialty, we can carry their products.”

Campbell notes that with a beer and wine license, the Hub City Co-op could also support a range of local and regional microbrewies and vineyards, each of which are fighting for shelf-space in standard grocery stores against national brands with far more name recognition. And other product possibilities — from locally made soap to Campbell’s own crochet work — could find their way onto the shelves.

From a purely local perspective, it’s easy to see the appeal of the co-op idea: Downtown-dwellers get a grocery store they can walk to; local shoppers have a new downtown destination; local farmers and food-makers have a location that will actively promote their products; and more casual shoppers should still be able to pick up the basics.

Of course, it takes a lot of hard work to turn a good idea into something more concrete. Money has to be raised, bylaws written, boards formed, leases signed and all manner of bureaucratic hoop-jumping completed. And, at some point, there comes a moment when you have to decide to keep it a nice dream or make it into a fallible reality.

“I reached that point about a week-and-a-half ago where I was either going to have to do this or not,” she says. “The push behind this idea was getting pretty strong. So, I had a conversation with my kids about it, where I told them that it could go one way or the other. We could be walking down the street, and somebody could say, ‘Hey, you’re the woman that started that co-op. Good job!’ Or they could say ‘Hey, you had that idea for that co-op. Sorry it didn’t work.’ They were like, ‘Go for it mom, do your best.’”

With her kids’ support, Campbell began to look for a location in earnest. Although details aren’t fully settled, the current favored spot is the retail space next to the Brasserie Ecosse and underneath the Hub-Bub. The benefits of that spot are many — parking and a loading dock topping the list — but it would also allow the Co-op to be part of the shift towards a westward downtown development.

Campbell produces a piece of paper, outlining a rough sketch of how she’d like to use the space, with a deck for outdoor seating, an ideal place to eat an all-local morning snack while drinking a cup of coffee roasted at Little River. Other ideas include regular craft events, various community classes in the space itself, and a large community bulletin board right near the front entrance.

For those of us who have been around co-ops — particularly the community-oriented kind that Campbell is hoping to create — the idea has a massive appeal. The question of whether or not it will be a benefit to the community has a clear answer — Of course it will — but a more pressing concern is if it will be financially viable.

Campbell is aware that there’s a very real possibility that it might not work.

“The fear is that we’re going to get all these people excited, and get all these people on board, and not be able to get the grants and donations that we need to run,” Campbell says. “You know, I’m a single momma, and I haven’t inherited something from a wealthy ancestor in Europe, so that’s my fear.”

To work, the project can’t just be Ashley Campbell’s dream, or Angelina Shuman’ dream, or even the dream of a few hundred people on Facebook. It needs significant support. Some of this comes in the obvious form — cold, hard cash — and some of it is as simple as having a few dedicated volunteers to help with the process. But there’s another kind of support needed, too. It’s a kind of stitching together of people and interests to the idea of this co-op. It’s people willing to introduce Campbell to their friends who are looking for a good project to support, or who would be willing to help her navigate the local government channels to talk to the people who can help get support for the idea at the city level. It’s local farmers and product-makers who would be willing to cut the co-op a sweetheart of a deal for the first few years.

And it’s a community who is willing to step up and commit to real, concrete support for the project. The first step in that process is showing up.

Tonight, the Hub City Co-op will hold its first community meeting in the Barrett Room of the Spartanburg Library Headquarters, at 6:30 p.m. The agenda for this informal meeting is posted here. For more information, visit the group’s Facebook page, or e-mail hubcitycooperative@yahoo.com.