How do you spend your day? Chances are cooperatives are a big part of it, from the moment you wake up until the moment you’re tucking yourself in for the night.
Let’s see. Your morning orange juice might have came from Florida’s Natural, a producer-owned cooperative, based in Florida but distributed throughout the U.S. If your morning coffee came from Equal Exchange, you get bonus points because they source their coffee from farmer-owned co-ops in developing countries, and they are a worker-owned co-op. If you go to a coffeehouse instead of brewing a pot at home, most likely that coffeehouse gets their beans from a co-op. If you like milk in your coffee or cereal, more than 86% of all fluid milk flows through a cooperative!
The wheat in your muffin or toast was most likely processed through a farmer-owned grain elevator somewhere near you, here in the Midwest. If you had cranberries in a muffin, they likely came from Ocean Spray, or maybe you used Land O’Lakes Butter or Welch’s Concord Grape Jam – all producer-owned cooperatives that make the products we love on our breads.
After that big co-op breakfast, it is time to move forward with your day. Working parents might drop off their young children at one of the over 1,000 pre-school co-ops that operate throughout the U.S.
Perhaps this is the day to make some improvements to your home. Ace Hardware, True Value, and Do It Best are all examples of purchasing cooperatives. These are small businesses that come together to form a co-op so that they can compete with big-box retailers that are not owned by people in the local community.
You might need to stop by your local credit union for a loan or pick-up some cash for that home project. More than 100 million people in the U.S. are members of a credit union. Just to clarify, credit unions fall into the cooperative category.
On your way home, you may stop at one of the 300 community-owned cooperative grocery stores in the country. Many of the meat products and vegetables in the country are also sourced from co-ops.
Here’s the best part!
After dinner, you may be watching TV or surfing the Internet through services provided by a local telecommunications co-op, such as Craw-Kan! There’s so much information steadily available for everyone through smartphones and tablets, as well as computers, and with the Internet of Things (IoT) everything seems to be connected to the world wide web, so by using Craw-Kan your life becomes a little easier to get that information.
From the first light of morning until bedtime, you can have a very cooperative day, so if you’re not currently a customer with Craw-Kan, now’s the time to switch! So Click HERE to see if you are eligible for fiber-optic internet.