How To Find Worker-Owned Businesses

I made workerowned.info to make it easy to buy from worker-owned companies online. You can enter men's pants or light roast coffee or board game space cats fascism and get pointed towards wonderful products sold by people whose focus is customers, not shareholders. Recently we pulled in some more co-ops and are getting closer to Amazon-like utility: Radiohead's OK Computer on vinyl, leopard print clogs, organic kimchi. We have >70,000 products from more than 175 co-ops!

This project started when I was in Denver a few months ago. Denver is secretly a prairie city, who knew? I flew in from the east and landed on flat land that stretches all the way to West Virginia. Just before snow-covered mountains abruptly wall off a terrain of uninhabited wonder, there is an urban center that boasts dozens of coffee shops.

With so many choices I figured it would be easy to choose a worker-owned coffee shop like my beloved Rock City in Rockland, Maine. But it was hard! It took a bunch of searching and reading on my phone, I nearly tripped over a discarded scooter at one point. And in the end, well, I don't think there is a worker-owned coffee shop in Denver.

So I made a web app that lets you enter in a city and it returns the locations of worker-owned shops. No one would be surprised to learn there are a lot in the Bay Area. I love Arizmendi, the fresh berry scones are truly incredible. But apparently people love Grey Owl in Oklahoma, which, fair or unfair, doesn't have the same reputation for worker activism I think.

From there I realized I could grow the tool to be a marketplace of products scraped from co-op websites. Like I said, you can find Space Cats Fight Fascism board games, but there are also plenty of practical items: belts, mouthwash, and hoodies. 

The site sends users to the worker-owned store's site. They get the traffic. It doesn't track you or store any information. One of the nice things about not centering your work around shareholders is you're not compelled to surreptitiously squeeze all you can from customers.

"Shareholder primacy" is the guiding doctrine of US business law. It serves those with enough wealth to set aside resources. Indirectly it serves customers. The bank shots usually go in: Starbucks is convenient, Amazon delivers quickly. But in this environment, co-ops get crowded out, consumers settle into Walmart and Kroger patterns. So I wanted to make shopping at worker-owned companies easier, and through that I want to introduce shoppers to alternatives to these near-monopolies. You go to the site looking for coffee, you leave with coffee and a Defector subscription (where David Roth writes about photography in the 1970s and current baseball player hair trends with an unequaled flair).

If your co-op has an online store on Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Squarespace, it can be on workerowned.info. If it's not, please reach out anyway. We can make custom scrapers to pull your co-ops products and include them or just add you to the directory so users can find you easily. And if you don't have anything to submit, just poke around and buy something.