Searchable directory of 22k+ products from worker-owned co-ops

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• Hacker News
• I wanted to buy from worker-owned cooperatives but there was no single place to see what they actually sell. So I scraped the product catalogs from ~60 worker-owned co-op stores and made them searchable.

  22,000+ products: coffee, chocolate, clothing, books, home goods, etc. You search, find something, and click through to buy directly from the co-op's store. Nothing goes through me.

  There's also a section for finding worker-owned coffee shops, restaurants, and bars by city (110+ listings, mostly US).

  Static Next.js site, JSON-backed search. No accounts, no tracking, no ads.

  Happy to answer questions about the data or how I identified which businesses are actually worker-owned. Please reach out if you want to add your co-op!

  by IESAI_ski
• Awesome project, keep doing this!
  by one33seven
• Very cool! I've submitted a co-op
  by large_garner
• Hey, this is pretty cool and very fast. So there is no database? How do you handle the scraping etc? Do the businesses know you are doing this?

  One thought, it might be good to list all of the products together,rather than only being able to view them by each business. Nice job :)

  by abrookewood
• How did you identify how businesses are worker-owned? Curious how it compares to other verification methods e.g. what my co-op had to go through to get a .coop domain as determined by these guys: https://identity.coop/policies/ Wasn't too hard or anything, just wondering what people are looking for to verify co-op-ness

  For categories, I guess software engineering would go under "other?" Did you find many services co-ops? I'm aware of a couple other software engineering co-ops/collectives in Europe but none in the USA. Seems to be a bit barren for some reason.

  by komali2
• This is good work.

  Ethical consumption in a capitalist economy is unachievable...but we can optimise

  by worik
• Consumption itself is unethical.
  by ljsprague
• totally. we can badger people to buy from better companies but that seems so tough. better to just make it easier for people to buy from better companies :)
  by IESAI_ski
• There is nothing inherently ethical about co-op owned organizations nor anything inherently unethical about privately owned organizations.

  The party vanguard of the worker co-op is exactly as capable of selfish or abusive behaviour as the private owner.

  by appreciatorBus
• The search field loses keypresses on mobile. I haven’t looked at the code, but I’m assuming it uses a React-style value binding but has some synchronous processing before it propagates the new field value back into the state variable. That is a really terrible pattern.
  by rafram
• <3 Wonderful. I discovered this:

  https://catalyticsound.com/artists/

  I never thought I'd see anything like that easily accessible on hacker news. (Edit: I say that because this is a project by independent artists that has no real hope for commercial exit -- monetize free jazz, I dare you. Edit: actually don't, please.)

  by erikschoster
• >monetize free jazz, I dare you. Edit: actually don't, please.

  I was going to say, I think youtube/spotify et al have been doing this for years, just slap ads on it.

  by goodmythical
• This is awesome- thank you!
  by 650REDHAIR
• This is super fast. Great job!
  by Rauchg
• No B2B SaaS D:
  by derektank
• It seems Europe has no worker owned co-ops :(
  by dtj1123
• +1 to the combined all-products view with category tags..would make browsing way easier. Nice work
  by fabijanbajo
• Might be good to bring each sites Favicon in, will add some colour and differentiation to the lists.
  by khurs
• Trying to add something, I find that the formulary looks made only thinking in USA. City and State ...
  by Zardoz84
• How this works? I would like to know more about the development and infrastructure.
  by nathanredblur
• good to see this but all of them pay taxes in the US. we need something like this in Europe as well. think global but act local ...
  by DyslexicAtheist
• Wikipedia has a list of worker-owned cooperatives worldwide, including a section for European cooperatives:

  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives>

  There is Cooperatives Europe, though it does not seem to include a members / firms list:

  <https://coopseurope.coop/>

  by dredmorbius
• I took a brief look at some of the products like coffee and im not sure they are competitive. What exactly is the premium coming from ?
  by zuzululu
• Real coffee beans not genetically engineered to grow fast with caffeine densities high enough to make explosives out of.
  by _factor
• Coffee is much cheaper with slavery or ultra heavy exploitation. Once the workers have a say in it, the prices normalize.
  by one33seven
• Probably from actually paying human beings for their work
  by malvim
• I've been thinking about this recently: I think our economy is fake.

  Restaurants are expensive lately, but still, as a former restaurant owner, even the expensive 10$ takeout burrito I don't think would be possible without the great many laws the supply chain breaks. Undocumented labor from the farms through to the restaurants, for starters. Then the fact that the equipment we use is built in places that don't have our labor or health and safety laws, which lets those places manufacture for much cheaper prices, which feels like cheating.

  If we actually had a level playing field and didn't break laws, I don't think most of the luxuries we enjoy could actually exist at anywhere near current prices (and thus not at all).

  by komali2
• Really nice project. I wonder if discovery could be partly automated by crawling for worker owned or co op signals, then leaving the final verification to humans.
  by murats
• Nice site, although wow I downloaded 60mb of data by searching for two things... I reccomend you just make people click search or smth before fetching api results, otherwise keep up the good work (=
  by korrectional
• Depending on the security of the sites you link to you might be able to show them locally in an iframe so users are only redirected if absolutely necessary and you can give an easy way back to search results/landing page
  by wthayer