[lbo-talk] Baby sitting coops?

[Gar Lipow]

A friend of mine told me about the Green Lantern Dinner club umm
somewhere in Mass? (speaking from unreliable memory) No longer in
existence. They rented a cheap building. You could get two meals a
day. The no money cost option was to work umm one day a week? Two days
a week? Something like that. Or you could pay and work less. (Paying
members were important cause they covered cost of food, renting the
building, power and so on.)  Also people could walk in off the street
and pay for a meal, treating it as a diner. Not particularly cheap,
but some people enjoyed the atmosphere and "meal at a time" customers
provided revenue that helped keep everyone else's costs low. It served
two groups simultaneously: really was cheaper than buying groceries
for very poor people willing to pay in labor. Also was an inexpensive
way to get reasonably healthy meals for people (mostly but not only
men) who either did not  know how to cook or hated to cook. Many of
these were not poor, but just wanted to eat all their meals out
without spending a fortune and still getting something both healthy
and tasty. The vast majority of those at the Green Lantern were
subscribers who ate two meals a day there every day for either of
those reasons.

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 7:35 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> We had in the student apartments at Michigan what we called a baby-sitting
> pool. You called the secretary, she got a parent who was available, & booked
> the hours. It worked fine. There was always someone.
>
> Is this what Krugman calls a co-op. That seems a bit pretentious.
>
> A Tenants Committee did come out of acquaintances made through the pool. It
> was just getting underway as I left, so I don't know what happened later.
>
> Carrol
>
>
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