Alternative Exchange continues the democratic structure of co-operative business on campus

Students gather on McKeldin Mall for the Alternative Exchange pop-up. (Simone Ebongo Bayehe/The Black Explosion)

For the four worker-owners of cooperatively-owned thrift store Alternative Exchange, a democratic business structure pushes their ideals beyond profit. The “store” prides itself on its cheaper-than-most merchandise, an environmentally friendly purchase and donation method and a credit system that accounts for stock depletion.

The business structure of Alternative Exchange is similarly organized to the, now closed, Maryland Food Co-op. It was there where thrift store worker-owners Arielle Gottlieb, a sophomore undeclared business major, and Emily Fox, a sophomore philosophy, politics and economics major, were former worker-owners. 

Fellow co-owners Aviah Krupnick and Conor A. James – a sophomore philosophy, politics and economics major and senior English major, respectively - were organizers who frequented the shop. Fox, Gottlieb, Krupnick and James do not see their business suffering a fate similar to the Food Co-op. They believe that despite the lack of administrative support, there is a necessity in ensuring that the same alternative business model remains active on campus.

“I think it's important for students to learn about other ways businesses can be run, aside from how they run now,” Fox said. “We understand the value of democracy in our government because leaders are accountable to the people, but all of our businesses are run in essentially little monarchies where your boss makes all the decisions for you, and those are pretty important decisions about your life.”

The new co-op was born as a counter to what Fox calls traditional “hierarchical business structures” and a fast fashion industry that is “wasteful and exploitative”. 

According to Green America, a May 2018 Global Labor and Justice (GLJ) report conducted across “50 supplier factories across Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka” identified that “without authorization or affiliation, fast fashion brands carry no legal obligation to ensure decent working conditions in the bottom tiers of their production network. And because unauthorized subcontractors are unregistered, they operate without government regulation and oversight, resulting in deteriorating work facilities where worker abuse runs rampant.”

“If we continue, you know, operating our economy around fast fashion, once the climate crisis hits we're going to be we're not going to be able to sustain ourselves,” Fox said.

“It's important to note that we chose to be a thrift store, like that was a very calculated, thought through-decision because when you think about, okay...clothes [are] kind of a consumerist and materialist, like how is that radical?” Krupnick said. “But we realized that has a lot of intersections with the problems that we think are really pressing and care about. And they also cast the widest net of interest to engage people in the UMD campus who might not be intrigued by just something being a co-op.”

The quartet advertises with organized clothing swap pop-up shops approximately twice a month, expanding outside of their social media, email newsletter and Slack channel to spread the word about Alternative Exchange. This outreach opens the shop to becoming what Gottlieb calls a “community project”, but the journey has not been easy.

“It's like a new challenge every single time because we had no infrastructure,” James said. “We wanted people to be able to get involved, so we needed to define what the roles were, what the different tasks that needed to be accomplished - we had to figure out spreadsheets for prices and things like that, how we could keep this as cheap as possible but still exist and not just completely lose everything.”

Establishing their footing in this new, democratic business structure came with the assistance of the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED). Per Krupnick, it was through BRED’s Worker Cooperative Jumpstart that the four were able to learn about the foundational underpinnings of how to run a democratic cooperative businesses and integrate that into a community.

“Setting up as a legal entity is complicated because Maryland doesn't recognize cooperatives as a type of separate business structure,” Krupnick said. “So that's hard if we want to incorporate several worker-owners as founders and not have all the privileges vested in one person.”

“Rock star” volunteers like senior psychology major Catherine A. Oberfield can gain voting rights if they attend three meetings in a row and assist with shop operations for at least one hour a month. For shoppers focused on ethical labor and environmental rules, like freshman animal science major Ashanti Mangrum, or even casual purveyors like sophomore cell biology major Simone Evans, their purchases help sustain a system that gives back to the environment.

The team hopes to reach its next plateau by attaining a storage space.