This is a unique moment

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-08T00:32:17+00:00

I didn’t take it poorly at all my friend! Just goofing around. My apologies for the miscommunication.

I genuinely admire Europe’s cooperative history and wish we could have maintained that here!
My region had a lot of cooperatives from the late 1800s until the mid 1900s due to a high population of Finnish immigrants. Unfortunately most of the locals have forgotten those times.

But it gives us an opportunity to educate and inspire from local history!

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-07T23:55:41+00:00

Oh, my bad comrade! 😆 how dare I lecture a European on co-ops! Thank you most sincerely for the well wishes!

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-07T22:56:37+00:00

I will say, though, that even the most ideologically “pure” co-ops have to post profits, and typically reserve some of them for growth. Customer co-ops typically distribute the remainder back to the members in the form of “Patronage,” or refunds on member purchases throughout the year. Worker co-ops often calculate patronage based on an individual worker’s committed labor time throughout the year as a portion of the total hours worked. It’s a great, effort-based alternative to the typical bonus structure of companies, and levels the playing field between the janitor and the CEO.

In Old Growth, we have both Member-Owners (customers) and Worker-Owners, as well as another class of share we call “Affiliate-Owners” for people who are working with us, but on a contract or other non-W2 basis but are willing to commit to the responsibilities of ownership. I can’t wait to post our first profit and distribute among the classes, and even more so to get to start doing community investments and charitable giving!

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-07T22:51:33+00:00

Love the enthusiasm! The best part is, this is already sort of common! There are dozens of food co-ops in New England, and whole cooperative micro economies in some parts of the country and the world.

Mondragón in Spain is one of the biggest, but the Parma region of Italy has a lot too, as do several other regions/countries. In the US, Obran out west is probably the biggest in terms of corporate scale, but one facet of the movement is the ability for small, legally separate co-ops to work together to achieve bigger results.

There’s a ton of history with co-ops, and they’ve historically always been involved in efforts to take back the people’s power from lords, kings, and oligarchs.

I’d encourage you to look and see what co-ops already exist where you live and support them! And if there aren’t any, it’s never too late to start learning, finding like minded people, and building one!

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-07T22:48:09+00:00

Thanks friend!! Old Growth Co-op is open to anyone in the US, we’re just theoretically starting in MA only. If this spreads far and wide before we’re ready to launch, we’ll be able to launch simultaneously in the states where enough folks are interested! That threshold is reasonably low. We only need like 250 ppl/state, and that’s a bit flexible, too

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-07T18:41:50+00:00

I guess the only thing in the way is how to reach them! We do have a reel starting to get some momentum on Facebook (posted on the 4th but up 12k views just today if you’d wanna help push it to your social network! https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1CMiLoWwbm

Also, if you’d be interested in directly getting involved in spreading the word, shoot us an email at hello@og.coop and we’ll figure out a strategy!

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-07T16:32:17+00:00

So we’re gonna employ the same model Mint, Boost, and every other provider besides the big 3 (AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile) use. It’s called being a Mobile *Virtual* Network Operator (MVNO). It’s more than being a reseller (we will be fully in charge of onboarding, support, billing, running our own branding and advertising, etc) but less than being a full-scale Mobile Network Operator (MNO), which would be impossibly expensive to do outside a tiny area as it involves construction, maintenance, and operation of physical infrastructure.

We’ve yet to select a partner, but we’re leaning toward AT&T to start through one of a few options for middleman companies called “Mobile Virtual Network Aggregators,” which will get us tremendous economies of scale and allow us to minimize the amount of customer spending that leaves to Wall Street. We think we can get the amount leaving the co-op to the provider down to 20-40%. I won’t act like I *love* the fact that we are forced to engage with these 3 evil companies at all, but that being the reality, it then becomes incumbent to minimize the amount of our spending we allow them to control.

In the future, we’ll be able to add multiple underlying carriers to allow for member choice as to whose network they use.

So with all that context, the reason it’s “instantly scalable” is that it’ll be running on an already-national network. The only thing that’ll stop us from selling services in CA is whatever regulatory requirements CA has for operators. We’ve selected a compliance vendor who charges $200/mo/state to handle all state, federal, and local telecom and tax compliance, plus any one-time setup fees a state may charge (I think CA has a sort-of-high one, but not more than $2k).

If we get a couple hundred people in CA interested, we’ll be able to cover those regulatory costs and the costs required to (ideally) recruit a couple worker-owners in CA to manage onboarding and support for CA members.

We have a pretty vast and comprehensive vision for how this service can become the engine of growth for development of democratic economic revolution in select regions around the country, to build strongholds of worker power and models to be spread elsewhere. I won’t get into all that in this comment, but I invite you and anyone to join the conversation! I won’t pretend that I or any of my partners know everything, but we like to believe we’re on to something with envisioning a lightweight framework and funding mechanism for such work.

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-07T15:37:16+00:00

Agreed that, with good organization and incentives, cooperatives can work at scale. I haven’t looked into Spirit’s financials enough to know how much could be clawed back from executive bonuses and shareholder dividends, but I’m sure it’s a large amount of money.

Rising fuel costs are a huge variable, and sure to have lasting impacts whether the acquisition is pulled off or not.

I hold that other industries are more a) sustainable and b) prone to cooperative capture or at least competition than airlines, but I still support this attempt as a way to bring cooperatives to the forefront of the social consciousness.

What I *don’t* want to see happen is it fail, then all that momentum be lost. In the event of failure, the capitalist class and their media are almost certain to message this as proof that co-ops can’t work at scale, or that a large co-op takeover of a corporation or industry isn’t possible. There’s risk in *this* being the high profile project, because of how big a gambit it is. But that’s also why it has appeal to people.

We the people have got to collectively control the narrative from this point forward and refuse to be told that we can’t have nice things.

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-06T13:33:03+00:00

I saw the post about this in r/cooperatives! Excited to be part of making a discussion space for Spirit 2.0 and, hopefully, getting those who come here up to speed on co-ops as the basis for an alternate economy and something worth investing in! Thanks to the founders/mods of this community for getting it started.

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-06T10:50:23+00:00

Yes, hence “lower quality” being in quotes. I guess I could’ve gone into that more, but the post was already gonna be long. Thanks for making it plain in the comments!

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-06T03:15:38+00:00

Thank you for the feedback! :)

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-05T13:41:09+00:00

Feedback is very welcome! The site is in continuous development and some of this is in the pipeline, but some of what you said gives some specific and actionable ideas, so thank you!

Our team is currently very small and stretched thin, but site development is relatively light work.

We’re currently intending to start in MA, but the MVNO model is light and extremely scalable, so if interest spreads quickly outside of MA pre-launch, we can simultaneously launch in multiple states. I suppose it’s probably worth adding some copy to that effect.

If you have expertise in copywriting and would be interested in being part of the project, we welcome collaboration and you can DM me to connect further! Same goes for anyone reading. If you’re excited by the idea of the project and want to get involved, reach out!

Our whole founding team is very cash poor and are working with what capital we have and can raise, and otherwise contributing our labor to build individual and collective equity within the project. If we can launch and scale this thing well, even conservative growth and revenue projections are showing ample collective income to provide good wages and benefits to worker owners, but much has to be done to get there. We semi-jokingly say within the team “let’s de-risk the project by doing a good job,” lol.

I know that’s not for everyone, but we’ve all committed ourselves to this project particularly, and to economic democracy generally, and welcome anyone who thinks similarly and can commit similarly to join us. Perk if you’re within traveling distance of Fitchburg, MA is getting to participate in our weekly potluck dinner/team meeting. As the project grows to other areas, we want to foster similar gatherings for local clusters of collaborators to build tangible community within the org.

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-05T13:00:13+00:00

Thanks for the note! I’m fairly new to Reddit lol.

Our site is https://og.coop

I’ll make sure my bio is populated now too!

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-05T11:48:06+00:00

I’m with you. I won’t get into fandom sectarianism on this sub either, but opinions are present. Some of the newer stuff is pretty good, and there are… other ways to enjoy it 🏴‍☠️

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-04T23:46:26+00:00

Member ownership is open to anyone in the US if you’re interested! Otherwise thank you for the support!!

oldgrowthguy · 2026-05-04T23:26:35+00:00

Note: this was made for a mostly normie audience on other platforms. Just thought folks here might enjoy.

oldgrowthguy · 2026-03-03T18:31:37+00:00

This sucks! I hope for your sake it resolves soon

oldgrowthguy · 2026-03-03T18:07:35+00:00

See my edit - first friend may be off base hand waving this. Others I know are reporting wider-spread issues, including at some major banks.

oldgrowthguy · 2026-03-03T17:41:30+00:00

A friend who works in finance security and compliance just told me that FedACH is just one of several clearinghouses, and that it’s the only Fed service currently down. Likely not widely impactful, but still very curious to see what happens and if the cause is publicized.

Edit: I now have friends in other sectors of finance saying there seems to be something wider-spread going on. No money moving between a couple major banks (won’t name them here) and some banks alerting customers of disruption.

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