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Bay Area Co-ops: ‘A Bunch of Weirdos’ Run a Grocery Store
Staff at San Francisco’s Rainbow Grocery reflect on collectivity, retail personhood, and an aesthetic disagreement that ended in a fistfight.
This story is part of a new series in which we shine a spotlight on the Bay Area’s many worker-owned cooperatives.
Gordon “Zola” Edgar, a renowned cheesemonger at San Francisco’s Rainbow Grocery Cooperative, remembers a co-worker at the store’s front desk who, when a customer demanded to speak to a manager, ducked behind the counter and popped back up: “Hi, I'm the manager. Can I help you?”
Edgar laughs telling the story now, 31 years into his tenure at the store. He doesn't recommend the tactic (it tends to escalate things). But the tale does capture something essential about working at a place where Karens drift through the aisles like hungry ghosts, aimless without a manager at whom to direct their ire. At Rainbow, the buck stops with the 200 or so worker-owners.