About Tom’s…
Tom’s was a viable business for most of 50 years; we don’t know exactly how the original owners made it work, and presumably there were ups and downs, and lean times, and times when it was more or less successful at meeting community needs.
When Tom and Bonnie sold the place, the new group of owners found it impossible after two years to meet their goals for the business. While they maintained sales volumes and worked hard to meet customers’ needs, they paid themselves very little for a lot of work, and they could not justify paying increased rent when, perhaps inevitably, that time came.
As non-experts in retail business, we have analyzed the financials and believe that a small natural foods grocery closely tuned to the interests of the community could be financially viable, including maintaining typical retail hours and paying a fair wage to a small staff.
The 50-year old institution that was Tom’s leaves behind a legacy of goodwill and support that should translate to a well-executed food co-op; and starting fresh should allow a new business to solve some of the problems of the old place (too small, not easily accessible, parking challenges); however, the loss of the actual Tom’s location has an impact and is hard to replace.
A food co-op is a business enterprise that is operated by and for the benefit of its members. As such, launching a food co-op has all of the same risks as launching a grocery store, with the added complexity of requiring community engagement and democratic governance. We have been told that starting a food co-op from scratch is a process that typically takes 5 to 10 years. We believe that we can shorten that significantly, in part because of the Tom’s legacy, but that we should plan for at least two years.
Because of the risks and complexity of starting a food co-op, we believe the community should make a significant upfront investment in professional advising, including market analysis, business planning, and financial and legal advice. We estimate the need for that upfront investment to be in the range of $10,000 to $20,000. (We are actively reaching out to professional cooperative advisers to refine this estimate.)
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, and we have actually taken several steps:
We have filed Articles of Incorporation with New York State, which creates a legal entity that can adopt bylaws and is accountable for actions taken in the name of “Tom’s Natural Foods Cooperative”. (The members of the steering committee are the initial directors of that cooperative corporation).
We have created/acquired necessary communication tools: an email list, domain names, a post office box, Facebook/Instagram accounts, and now this website!