Marc Brown, Director, People’s Food Co-op
December 2022
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” --Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
Although Dickens was writing about 19th Century England, he could just as well been describing the late 1960s in the United States. The country was still reeling from the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. It was the height of the war in Vietnam in which the United States was deploying chemical weapons on the local population. In Portland, Reed College and Portland State University were hotbeds of political activism opposing the war, the Nixon administration, American imperialism, environmental destruction, racism, and classism. It was also a time of “white flight” from the city to the surrounding suburbs driven, in large part, by the desegregation of public schools in Portland. On the other hand, communities were coming together to provide the safety net that the government failed to sustain. In Portland, some of the community institutions that arose during this time included the Fred Hampton People’s Health Clinic (named after the deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party who was assassinated by the United States government in 1969), the Malcolm X People’s Dental Clinic, and the Abortion Information and Referral Service.
Out of this ferment emerged two small Portland grocery stores, People’s Food Store in southeast Portland and Nature’s Food and Tool Shop in the Corbett district of southwest Portland. People’s started its life as “The Southeast Food Conspiracy,” a food buying club that took orders for natural and organic foods from its members and distributed those orders from the Centenary-Wilbur Methodist Church in southeast Portland. The Southeast Food Conspiracy, so named because its goal was to conspire against the corporate-dominated food industry, rented a small grocery store building at 3029 SE 21st Avenue in 1970 and opened a nonprofit grocery store, People’s Food Store.
The origins of Nature’s Food and Tool Shop are a bit murky. Its origin story often involves a small store on the main floor of a house in Corbett. Within a few months of starting, a fire destroyed the business. As the story goes, Stan Amy and a few others purchased the business, renamed it Nature’s Northwest, and reopened the store as a natural food store. Over the next decade Nature’s opened numerous locations throughout the Portland metropolitan area, including, in 1993, a store at 30th and Division to compete directly with People’s. In 1996, the owners sold Nature’s Northwest for $17.5 million to GNC, a national corporation built on the sale of vitamins and nutritional supplements. Two years later GNC sold the business to Wild Oats, a natural foods company based in Colorado. After the acquisition, Wild Oats rebranded Nature’s Northwest as Wild Oats and, ultimately closed the Division store. Whole Foods purchased Wild Oats in 2007 as part of a trend of consolidation in the grocery industry. Finally, ten years later, Amazon bought Whole Foods. Thus, what had been a local grocery chain was assimilated into the behemoth that Amazon has become.
Meanwhile, in 2000, several of the founders of Nature’s Northwest started a new natural foods store, New Seasons. In 2004, New Seasons, like its predecessor, opened a store to directly compete with People’s. In 2013, a venture capital firm purchased a majority stake in New Seasons and in in 2019, New Seasons, which still refers to itself as a “neighborhood grocery store,” was purchased by a subsidiary of E-Mart, a South Korean corporation and the oldest and largest discount chain in South Korea.
Over the years during which Nature’s grew and then became part of Amazon, and while New Seasons started, grew, and became part of E-Mart, People’s remained as a single-location natural food grocery store. We, the owners, remained steadfast that it not carry meat products. People’s refused to sell certain products due to questionable labor practices of the producers. Furthermore, People’s retained its local focus, purchasing as much as possible from local sources, for 51 years and counting.
The sale of Nature’s and New Seasons enriched a handful of individuals at the expense of the workers who saw their benefits and wages drop or stagnate. People’s has enriched no one from a monetary perspective. However, People’s has enriched thousands from the perspective of providing locally sourced natural and organic foods, and providing the power of cooperative ownership.
Half a century later, which store was more successful? I suppose that depends on how a person defines success. People’s Food Cooperative is still operating in its first and only location. Nature’s Northwest no longer exists, having been assimilated by the largest online retailer in the world. People’s is owned by thousands of individuals and families, each owning one share. New Seasons, before it was purchased by E-Mart, was owned by a few families. In my book, our store is far more successful than either Nature’s or New Seasons because People’s continues on its original mission to provide healthful and locally sourced products to its patrons. In the end, our store succeeds where no corporate-owned business can, putting people before profit.
