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!
Very nice and appreciate the effort you put into making this.
Some Improvements that could help:
the location search could be an actual map with pins which would be easier to use
some kind of tags for the different appareal items would help clarify which one, currently i have to click and search each vendor for things im looking for. Specifically autistic friendly / sensory clothing items.
Enter your US employer's name or stock ticker symbol (e.g. Amazon, Apple, JP Morgan Chase) and your compensation to see how your pay compares to company-wide financials. Basically, you can see how much more they could have paid you. Also shows stock buybacks and dividends, so u can see how much more they could have paid you instead of the stock market.
It will be intresing an automation that check online for word like “worker cooperative”, “worker-owned” to find new candidate that fit.
Ofc the hard part is confirming if it's genuinely worker-owned, so keeping that step human makes sense. But the discovery/shortlisting could be largely automated crawl the web, score candidates by how many co-op signals they hit, and present the top ones for you to vet.
Would be happy to help prototype something like this if you're interested (i really like your idea).
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.
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.
Neat project and I love the motivations behind it.
A few friendly recommendations:
• The images on the results pages are in desperate need of optimization. Plenty of 500KB+ thumbnails and even a couple 2MB+ thumbnails I saw in there. Could easily be optimized 90%+ with no loss of quality
• The instant live search can be a little distracting, particularly paired with the heavy loading of the thumbnails
• I know you don't want to create your own full ecomm site, but even just a hover PDP without having to click off could be nice, if you could pull in the key product details. I know the goal is to support the destination sites but it was a lot of back and forth to me
• Any ability to validate that a product is available vs sold out (and note that on the results pages) would be appreciated. Probably 75% of the items I checked on ttgaming.quest were sold out. A banner across items not in stock would be helpful. Or a filter on the search results page.
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.)
Nice site! Maybe add link correction? Sometimes I found myself going to sites and though target landing page was wrong or out-of-date, surfing the site a bit, found similar or same product still offered. Would have to have some way of trusting / verifying the corrections but some people would find it satisfying to offer fix the bad links I bet.
Curious that you include REI. It's a retail coop model, not a worker-owned coop.
Apropos: the way they ended the REI Adventures program is behavior consistent with a normal big-box chain. That is, announce the end simultaneously to their customers and REI's partner adventure companies, provide refunds to customers, but don't forward the relevant same customer info to the partners for rebooking because that's REI's proprietary data.
If that's also behavior consistent with a worker-owned coop, I have to ask: what is the social benefit of worker-owned over a normal corporate structure? And if it's not, why point the user to REI for a pair of hiking shorts?
I read this post while sitting at Broken Clock Brewing here in Minneapolis, one of the 13 listed and my favorite brewery. There are actually 2 in my city. I actually picked up an ownership card and anyone can buy in for $200, but dividends don't start to pay out until some indefinite point where the voting owners decide the business can sustain it.
A lot of co-op talk around this thread, if anyone else has worked in / founded co-ops, I would love to chat, email in my profile. I founded one about 5 years ago and have been kinda shooting from the hip, would love to trade ideas.
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
37 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 48.7 ms ] thread22,000+ 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!
Ethical consumption in a capitalist economy is unachievable...but we can optimise
Some Improvements that could help: the location search could be an actual map with pins which would be easier to use some kind of tags for the different appareal items would help clarify which one, currently i have to click and search each vendor for things im looking for. Specifically autistic friendly / sensory clothing items.
Enter your US employer's name or stock ticker symbol (e.g. Amazon, Apple, JP Morgan Chase) and your compensation to see how your pay compares to company-wide financials. Basically, you can see how much more they could have paid you. Also shows stock buybacks and dividends, so u can see how much more they could have paid you instead of the stock market.
It will be intresing an automation that check online for word like “worker cooperative”, “worker-owned” to find new candidate that fit.
Ofc the hard part is confirming if it's genuinely worker-owned, so keeping that step human makes sense. But the discovery/shortlisting could be largely automated crawl the web, score candidates by how many co-op signals they hit, and present the top ones for you to vet.
Would be happy to help prototype something like this if you're interested (i really like your idea).
A few friendly recommendations:
• The images on the results pages are in desperate need of optimization. Plenty of 500KB+ thumbnails and even a couple 2MB+ thumbnails I saw in there. Could easily be optimized 90%+ with no loss of quality
• The instant live search can be a little distracting, particularly paired with the heavy loading of the thumbnails
• I know you don't want to create your own full ecomm site, but even just a hover PDP without having to click off could be nice, if you could pull in the key product details. I know the goal is to support the destination sites but it was a lot of back and forth to me
• Any ability to validate that a product is available vs sold out (and note that on the results pages) would be appreciated. Probably 75% of the items I checked on ttgaming.quest were sold out. A banner across items not in stock would be helpful. Or a filter on the search results page.
Keep up the good work!
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.)
Seems some of the results are outdated. For example Ubuntu Coffee Collective in Emeryville is permanently closed.
Apropos: the way they ended the REI Adventures program is behavior consistent with a normal big-box chain. That is, announce the end simultaneously to their customers and REI's partner adventure companies, provide refunds to customers, but don't forward the relevant same customer info to the partners for rebooking because that's REI's proprietary data.
If that's also behavior consistent with a worker-owned coop, I have to ask: what is the social benefit of worker-owned over a normal corporate structure? And if it's not, why point the user to REI for a pair of hiking shorts?
https://www.brokenclockbrew.com/
https://www.workerowned.info/marketplace/beer-brewing