Sunset grocery to shut on Inauguration Day in protest
On the day after the presidential election, the mood at Other Avenues food co-operative in the Outer Sunset was dire. Its worker-owners moved about the grocery store in mourning, feeling stunned and powerless. Steven Watson, one of the members of the collective, had an idea.
“Maybe one way to boost us out of this depression is to shut down and in some small way to fight back,” he said.
Last week, the co-op posted a sign on its front doors: “Other Avenues will be closed in the spirit of passive resistance on Inauguration Day, Friday, January 20.”
The decision to close in protest was not an easy one, said Shanta Nimbark Sacharoff, a member of the 42-year-old worker collective. It required hours of debate for the 17 members to reach consensus.
“We are open 363 days per year,” Nimbark Sacharoff said. “We are only closed on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and on May Day.” The first of those holidays, in fact, falls just days before Inauguration Day, and losing two days’ worth of income in the same week is no small matter for such a small store.
(Rainbow Grocery, San Francisco’s other existing food coop, has decided to stay open.)
The collective members crafted a statement that will be posted on the store’s windows as well. It reads in part: “Other Avenues does not endorse candidates for political office, but when someone is so diametrically opposed to what we stand for, we feel we have no other option but to stand up for those ideals.”
Some of the members worry that they are inconveniencing their regular shoppers, and that Other Avenues risks alienating Donald Trump supporters who shop there. “We’d hate to lose their business, but we do have the right to exercise our freedom of speech,” Watson said.
Some of the worker-owners will spend the day at protests, but the closure is the only action they are embarking on as a group. Nimbark Sacharoff, who has been part of the collective for 35 years, said the store has acted in protest only once before, canceling a collective meeting to attend a march against the watering down of the federal organic standards.
Even then, she says, some members remained at the store, unwilling to let their customers down.
Other Avenues, 3930 Judah St. (at 44th Avenue), San Francisco, www.otheravenues.coop.
“When someone is so diametrically opposed to what we stand for, we feel we have no other option but to stand up for those ideals.” Statement from the collective’s members