We've always been growing. The co-op's done really well in this community. And I think it did create some tensions for people who had originally started the pre-order. There was a very strong focus in the beginning on quality food products at the very lowest price. And then once you get into expanding your staff, and there was that tension between “No, volunteers should do everything,” thinking about things like benefits or even paying people for when they're not there working.

Of course, growing was always a big discussion. We always, from the very beginning, even if in that small space, we expanded the space, there were some of us, why do we need to grow? Why do we want to put money into this growth? Is it necessary to grow? And those voices were louder when we moved into the new building. And so we were first in the old small building. And I remember it was actually, how do we deal with the many customers?

It's too crowded. So we needed to get physically bigger. And so we surveyed the members and said, you know, what would you like us to do? How should we get bigger? And overwhelmingly they said stay downtown, which was the most complicated and expensive way to do it. We built kind of this funky building because we built to our property boundary, so it's an interesting shape. We went through a lot of big changes there.

I mean, having to work while the other store was under construction and having half of that building cut off to make room for the other store was definitely a big challenge. We had a Quonset hut to take the place of where all of our storage had been, and there were freezing conditions and there were too hot conditions and times when we were losing a lot of product. We had crooked floors and things where you had to hang on to a wall if you wanted to pull something off a shelf so you could keep the cart upright.

We were never closed. We had a huge tent in front of our old store. We had air conditioning in there and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. And it was a wild time. I think it created some tension and some challenges and people weren't always pleased with growth. And then other people were quite pleased with growth and the ability to carry kind of more products.