VIDEO. “Exemption from mass distribution”: in Marseille, a cooperative supermarket as an alternative

Here the client is more than a client: he is both a volunteer and a bit of a boss. Super Cafoutch, opened in September, now has 1,260 members. Principle: give some money at the beginning and then some of your time every month to be able to shop there.

Like La Louve, created in Paris in 2016 and modeled after the Park Slope food cooperative in New York, about fifteen non-profit supermarkets have opened in France. From now on, Marseille also has his own. The only obligation to be able to shop: to work there voluntarily for three hours a month. To be economically viable, the structure would need to reach around 2,000 cooperators, “60% of which will shop with an average basket of 150 euros per month,” says Super Cafoutch president Eva Chevalier.

If they are indeed shareholders of Super Cafoutch by purchasing ten shares for 100 euros (one share for 10 euros for the most modest), the expected return on investment by the co-operators is far from market logic. Savings on wages and intermediaries allow the supermarket to apply a fixed margin of 20% to all items.

So of course, admits Hughes, one of the store’s three permanent employees, “the context of inflation also plays a role” in the decision to join the co-op. But “it goes far beyond,” the president insists: “It is also a model whereby we would like our society to function in a more collaborative, friendlier manner” so that “everyone finds his or her own account,” including manufacturers, on which “we will never press for the lowest price.”