45th Anniversary Stories: Paul Chartrand
Image of Paul Chartrand courtesy of Julia Schulz
An interview with Paul Chartrand, as told to Julia Schulz
Interview performed by Julia Schulz
(Editor’s note: This interview was edited for length and for clarity)
Before there was a Good Tern Co-op: Buying clubs and pre-order co-ops
I’ve lived in Rockland since 1986, and I was involved with the Co-op even before then. I was really attracted to the co-op model as a sort of anti-capitalist way of people building trust in a community and having control over their economic lives, and that's why I've always been part of them wherever I live and still will continue.
I first got involved with co-ops in 1969 or ‘70. Some friends and I were living together and buying bulk natural foods from Erewhon in Boston. We formed a buying club in our house and invited neighbors and others in town to order with us. We were ordering in bulk and breaking the orders down and dividing them up. That was in Amherst, Mass. So, that was a co-op. We didn't call it that, but it was in a sense a buying club of natural foods from Erewhon.
Shortly after, we and other people started a more official, bigger co-op called Yellow Sun, which might still exist in Western Mass. At that time, there were pre-order co-ops, which Yellow Sun was, springing up all over New England. We took trucks to Boston to the produce market every week or two to pick up big loads and divide them up.
From then on, anywhere I lived, I became involved in the co-ops that were there or started one if there wasn't one. I was involved in Worcester, Massachusetts later, and then Midcoast Maine, when I moved here for a year or two in ’74 and ‘75. In St. George, with some other people, we started Foghorn Co-op, which was a pre-order co-op. That was part of the Maine Federation of Cooperatives, which I was involved in.
Before there was a Good Tern Co-op: Trucking to Boston on buying trips
We had trucks that went to Boston every week. I did a lot of that, picking up food, fruit, and vegetables and cheese at the Boston Market. There was a route coming up through Maine along the coast where you'd stop in Portland, Damariscotta, Rockland, unloading these big loads of food. It was a lot of fun. We rented big trucks, which was an adventure in itself, because none of us were really familiar that much with trucking.
I remember a famous time getting stuck going under one of those bridges on Storrow Drive in Boston that says, maximum height 12 feet. And somehow, I thought we could do it and drove into it. We got out. A state policeman stopped traffic and let us back up. He didn't give us a ticket or anything. We didn't break the bridge down. We didn't really hit it… we just stopped right before it.
I used to love the trips to Boston. The co-op movement at that time had a more political edge to it. There were people in it who were kind of committed radicals. The Boston Food Co-op was a big co-op, but very political. Cambridge Food Co-op also. And so we'd go down in these big trucks, usually three of us minimum, from different Maine co-ops. We took turns going, and we'd stay overnight the night before with some of these radical Boston Food Co-op members in little apartments in Cambridge.
The co-op movement had this broker at the Chelsea Market, this huge, long warehouse with lots of stands: one company sells tomatoes, another one peppers. . . There's at least 50 of them, and you have to stop at at least 20 of them to fill your truck. You can't just show up there—there's a broker from NEFCO, New England Food Cooperative Organization. He was there finding the best deals on a given day and negotiating for co-ops all over New England, and you'd meet him there. Leonard would say, “Here's your tickets.” And they'd be like, booth number 75, peppers, and he'd meet us at some of those, but he didn't follow us around. Backing the truck up among all these professional truckers was sort of a trip, because everybody's in a hurry. They were all really sort of gruff Italian produce market people, but also really friendly and warm. They all got a kick out of these hippie truckers.
The New England food co-op movement bought a good amount of food. Now and then you'd cross Leonard, and he was more like the produce market people than he was like the co-op people. He'd be gruff and grab a pepper, bite into it and say, “Yeah, that's okay. And I'll take some of these,” really talking fast with the produce people. It was all a riot, and it was great fun. It was really fun to bring people who hadn't been there before to see it. You had to get there at, like, five in the morning. And then you'd be out of there by eight or nine and on the road to Maine with your load. Sometimes we actually had a truck and a trailer to hold the cheese. It was insane. The cheese was a big advantage in the early co-op movement, and our cheese connections at Chelsea were very good. All the stores and pre-orders in Maine had very good quality foreign and American cheeses at lower prices than you could find most anywhere for some reason. So all the co-ops ordered lots of cheese, and the loads were heavy. That continued somewhat into Good Tern, but then the Maine Federation of Co-ops, Fedco, eventually had their own warehouse and started doing deliveries to stores so that the co-ops in the region didn't have to go to Chelsea anymore. But it was fun when we did, and it gave you a good sense of how the food system operated.
Early days of the Good Tern
So yeah, I was into co-ops. I went to a lot of statewide co-op meetings plus the meetings of our own group. In the late ‘70s I was part of a co-op called Second Nature. But I also was still friends with people on the Midcoast; I was particularly close with a woman named Rochelle Garrett in ’79 or ’80. She was a member of the Camden Buying Club. There was also a Rockland one. Belfast Co-op was just getting started as a storefront. Rochelle thought it was time to try to have one in Rockland or Camden. We tossed the idea back and forth. I told her to put a questionnaire in the next Camden Buying Club pre-order co-op order forms to find out whether people would be interested in the storefront, what they could contribute, and where it should be. I didn't construct the questionnaire, but I claim to have given her the idea, whether she admits it or not.
The questionnaire was a success. There was some debate about whether it should be in Camden or Rockland and what the name should be. Rochelle became the first manager for about a year, then she moved to Bangor. I think after that, it was Susy Ellis.
1980: A Storefront on South Main Street
The Co-op had its first storefront on South Main Street in Rockland. Susy was the Manager; I already knew her because we were both involved in a statewide organization called Maine Organization for Cooperative Assistance (MOCA), a loan fund for co-ops only. It folded into the New England Cooperative Loan Fund some years ago. We had occasional meetings of MOCA on the coast, and Susy filled me in on Good Tern, what was going on there. Then when I moved here, in ’84 or ’85, Susy recruited me to be on the board. The people on it back then were Ken Crane, Abi Morrison, Christine Stephenson. Maybe Gregory Moore at the time. Probably Judy Powers.
I was on the board and stayed on it—was even President. It was a small board then: eight to ten— about what it's always been. But the membership base was smaller, so the people willing to serve on the board came out of a small group, and it almost rotated among 20 or so people in the community. Luckily, we had people with really good financial experience like Ken Crane. He ran Senter Crane. He was excellent at retail. It was a good working board, which was needed at that time, particularly. The national co-op movement wasn't really in existence, and it was up to co-ops on their own, kind of, to figure it out. In ‘94 I won a legislative seat, so I stepped off the board of Good Tern around ’95 for a number of years for my legislative work, my business, and my growing family. But I did join again in the 2000s. I became Treasurer again and stayed on until about 2015. For quite a while, Ken and I alternated. He was a better Treasurer than I, but I tried to maintain his level of quality.
Rewards and challenges of running a storefront co-op
I loved it when the store was in the South End because I was living in the South End. I could go in and see Susy or Sheryl or Helen or whoever was there at the counter—friends—and pick up the foods I liked and wanted to eat. It's just a joy of life in Rockland to be able to shop at Good Tern, and also be part of it and make and see friends. A lot of the friends I have in the Midcoast came out of the Co-op—people I might never have crossed paths with except at the Co-op.
And good friends like Susy Ellis and Sheryl and Tom. I knew Sheryl, too, before she was Manager of Good Tern. I sold advertising from MOFGA, and I also sold vitamin supplements on the side; I went around the state. In York, there was this natural food store called Sesame Tree, and Sheryl Cooper ran that. I got to know her when I was stopping in, selling whatever I was selling. When we were looking for a new manager, suddenly I see that there's an application from Sheryl Cooper. And then she came in for an interview. I think the board was pretty unanimous that they would hire Sheryl, and it was a good decision. I was happy to see that and happy I already knew her.
The biggest obstacles we faced early on? All of it: financial, logistical. . . We never felt any negative opinion from the Rockland community, nor the leaders politically. To most people in Rockland we were a local business. Some knew more about the cooperative model and principles than others. What most people saw was a store run by a bunch of hippies selling natural foods, which was okay.
One of the big assists in the early days of the Co-op was kind of a—what would you call it? A co-dependent relationship between the Co-op and the Curtis family who rented us that building on South Main. We had the cellar and the bottom floor. The building was in bad shape, really. But we got a really low rent. The Curtises were happy to have us there as long as we didn't ask too much of them. Polly Curtis was kind of a grand dame of the Rockland Albanian community. They were a grocer family—they'd had a grocery in that store building. Polly was really attached to the idea not only that we were renting it and not complaining, but that we were running a little grocery store there. That was a nice relationship with the Curtises.
One of the goals that the financial leaders of Good Tern, Ken Crane, primary amongst them, but me too and others, had always been to keep our debt to a minimum. Our main focus wasn't necessarily profits, but debt, or profit to debt ratio. We were very conservative about expansions and new investments. Ken always used to pride himself in looking at financials of other stores and saying, yeah, they have a great store, but their debt is incredible.
A lot of our disagreements and tough decisions were about staff. Staff evaluations were always tough, particularly manager evaluations; the board did them. First of all, personnel management is really hard unless you've done a lot of it, especially when we're all relatively close to the person: we shop at the store, we all believe in the same principles. It's tough.
Luckily, we had good managers most of the time. Susy was great. Sheryl Cooper was fantastic. Later a personnel committee developed, particularly with the new store, but they really depended on the opinions of the board. They would do the groundwork and research a little bit about the employee's performance, but when it came to, for example, how much of a raise do we give this person or not, they usually submitted that to the board, at least as long as I was involved. Because they were always tough decisions.
Good Tern and National Co-op Grocers (NGC)
And certainly a big decision of the Co-op that I was heavily involved in with our manager and his staff and the board in 2013 and 2014 was whether the Co-op should join NCGA [Now NCG, National Co-op Grocers, which is a business services cooperative for retail food co-ops in the United States]. I was strongly against it. I still am, more or less, although I believe that it's probably been the best decision for the Co-op to survive in the current climate. I certainly don't feel bad about it now. I'm glad they put it off as long as they did. I'll just cover it briefly because it's a lot about our co-op’s principles.
One of the important principles for us who were involved in the early years, and I think the founders, was that Good Tern was controlled by the members through the board and that members could work in the co-op and get discounts. It gets difficult to manage volunteers who don't know their job sometimes, and who maybe sometimes don't work quite as much as you think, but yet they're getting a certain percent discount. We were conscious of all that in the early years and said, well, our purpose here isn't to accumulate capital. If we have money, it goes back to the members after we pay the staff. There's no need to keep accumulating resources. Either we lower prices or we give a discount, which is lowering prices too. That was intimate to our view of what a co-op was.
And basically NCGA, at least in the 2010s, were strongly against that principle. They believed it was part of the past. “You're giving away your profits,” was one of the things they said. And to me, that was like, what? That's what we want to do. That's what we've done. And that's what we were going to continue to do.
What NCGA mainly offered was discounts on products from nationwide distributors. As they put it, “We're going to help you compete with Walmart because you need to.” It's true: we were competing with big box stores that were going organic. NCGA's answer was, “You've got to have lower prices and we're going to help you do it with our co-op buying program. And then you can bring in your little organic local stuff if you want. But, you've got to survive as a co-op..” Nobody ever said that, but that's sort of the message.
Like I said, I'm not against it anymore, but it's a big turning point in the history of the Co-op because it involved a kind of re-looking at our principles. To me, it was a major turning point in my evolution with the Co-op and partly accepting that it's a democratic organization. If the membership eventually decides to go with NCGA, that's fine. I know what I believe, and I'm going to stand up for that voice. I wrote an article in the Co-op paper in 2014 when we were discussing that issue. The Good Tern’s efforts to join NCGA got put off a few times because also NCGA could see that we were not unified on it, and they had strict principles about buying into it. I mean, NCGA’s services weren’t free, and necessitated a bigger bookkeeping and administrative staff on our end to keep up with their requirements.
Co-ops in France today
When all this was happening, I was spending more time in France with my current partner there who was part of a very similar co-op national movement in France called Biocoop, organic co-op. And I explored and researched and talked to her a lot about how Biocoop functioned. To me, it represented what I would have liked NCGA to be, which was not only an organization supporting co-ops, but with very strong ethical buying decisions, buying as much as possible in France and in Europe and only organic. And this is a huge group of 700+ stores all over France. All they can sell is 100% organic foods. I felt like that's what we need to do to differentiate ourselves from Walmart, et cetera. We can buy organic food. Yes, it costs more, but that's supporting the people who grow organically because it costs them more. And that's what this is all about: supporting farmers who grow organically. I'd seen a model that worked in Europe, so I knew it was possible. That's it. So that was that debate.
Now I'm still a member of the Good Tern, I get my 3% membership discount. I buy at Biocoops in France almost exclusively and support their organization. I'm actually a member there too. France has a strong co-op movement, as does the U.S., with many, many co-ops of all sorts. It's not just hippie natural food co-ops here. We all know there's been all kinds of co-ops in American history, particularly the 20th century.
One co-op in France I'm fond of is my phone network. It’s called Telecoop. I'm a member of it, and I pay for my monthly service from Telecoop. It's great! I can go to the annual meeting and vote. It's pretty cheap. They encourage people to not overuse their screens. It's kind of cool. They offer a program to help you to limit your screen time and limit the number of gigabytes you use, which is sort of counterproductive if it was a capitalist organization.
So, yeah, I still believe in participating in co-ops. I think in these times it's critical that people explore the idea of cooperatives more, because there's sort of a resistance to what's going on in local institutions that people are members of, and can control – like the co-ops and credit unions. I really enjoyed the Knox County Federal Credit Union when it existed. At the time when it had its little office on Limerock Street, it was very directly controlled by its local members. It was really a neat little thing.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Good Tern Co-op. Any content provided by the interviewee is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything. Good Tern has been a proud member of National Co+op Grocers (NCG) since January 2024. Our co-op, management, staff, and community have greatly benefited from the support and resources provided by NCG.
Learn more about NCG: https://www.ncg.coop/about-us