June 20, 2025
— Jeff Ward, Lehigh Valley News Briefs
Give me $3 million and 14 years, and I’ll open a co-op. Complete with drum circles.
The Bethlehem Co-Op has not existed for 14 years, but its advocates persuaded state and federal government to give it $3 million, it collected member fees and it wants more.
The Co-Op has been claiming it would open since at least 2022. Now, later this summer. I walked by a week ago. It was empty.
The Co-Op is not open at 250 E. Broad St., under apartments known as The Market Flats although there is no market. The apartments look nice.
The supporters may be earnest about getting fresh food (which we already have) to the masses but this is a mess. Years behind schedule and in debt, it’s hardly the kind of co-op that was popular in the 1960s and 70s.
Back then, co-ops were counter-cultural, a way to “stick it to the man,” to get food to “the people” without corporate middlemen. The produce might not be pretty or have a wax coating, but it would be cheap and nutritious.
The proposed Bethlehem Co-Op is hardly countercultural. It won the fawning approval of city government, $100,000 from the state and $2.9 million from the federal government (thanks, Lisa Boscola and Susan Wild). If the U.S. ever deals with its $36 trillion deficit, remember that grant and millions like it.
So this Co-Op hasn’t been “sticking it to the man.” It’s been sticking it to the taxpayers.
Now it wants low-interest loans from the members it raised $500,000 from already.
“Fool me once, shame on you … “. The idea is, get members to lend at 0% to 4% and use the money to pay off higher-rate debt.
The Co-Op wants $1.6 million for interest-rate arbitrage. Where has their money gone? At least $3.5 million, and they need to pay off debt. All so I can get some grimy celery root.
Stop the madness!
This isn’t a co-op. It’s a fund drive for an operation that exists only on a web page.
It reminds me of ManBearPig from South Park. With its committees, naive good intentions and debt, the co-op is a perverse three-way cross of the PTA, a ramshackle organic farm, and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
How did this happen? Nobody in government had the nerve to say, “Nice idea, you’re on your own, good luck.”
Also, we have less media and no editorial voices to say: Subsidizing this was a bad idea. I am noting the grants to government auditors.
We should have offered Trader Joe’s a few million to open in Bethlehem. That’s what people want. I could go for some of their Peanut Butter Filled Pretzel Nuggets right now.
So give me $3 million and 14 years, and I’ll open a co-op. Or $14 million and three years, even better.
My co-op will be the real thing. Ugly produce in wooden bins, prices on chalkboards, hippie girls making change (no credit cards, too corporate) and looking the other way when some grad student from the mean streets of Scarsdale or Upper Merion slips a parsnip into his jean shorts.
Barefoot stoners in the back, sorting potatoes … sorting the same potatoes, over and over and over … while they listen to Joan Baez.
Drum circles every Tuesday night.
Are you with me? Just send money! Operators are on duty!
Lehigh Valley News Briefs 
Is this the same group that used to have a co-op store in South Bethlehem in the 1970s?
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It isn’t. That little Southside Co-Op was around until the mid-80s or so.
The funny thing was, when this non-operating Co-Op started going to city meetings, they emphasized that they had no connection to the old one.
True. At the old one, you could actually buy food. More on that later.
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The article validates my suspicions that I’ve had for a few years now. Like that kickstarter project that offers you buy-in at various levels, complete with deadlines, then slowly winds down, mostly excuse based communications to a trickle, then poof! It’s gone! If you complain, Kickstarter (could be IndieGo Go as well) will read you their boilerplate, buy in at your own risk, it ain’t our fault, we don’t have to do any steenkin’ vetting.
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where are the financials? Has anyone ever seen them? When this idea was in its inception, did anyone say, this is how much money it is going to cost to start a co-op? If I own a grocery store, I want to see the financials. All the early money raised- how was it spent? On shady multi-level marketing- type schemes? Maybe not, but how would I know because member owners have never been able to see the financials. It has left me with a large amount of dismay that the early marketers of the co-op blew it, and now other people have to come in and make it work, still without clarity on the finances.
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They can do whatever they want with their own money, but how this nonsense ever qualified for federal and state money is a mystery.
I haven’t seen any records.
Jeff Ward
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