Let's Hear It for Jim Kenyon!

Jim Kenyon does not write about the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society very often in his Valley News humor column, since he is usually chortling about the region's Keystone Cops and their relentless pursuit of angelic, exam-cramming teenagers. But the Co-op is fortunate that, every year or so, Kenyon offers up the literary equivalent of slipping on a banana peel in the produce department.

This year's effort, usefully timed right between April Fool's Day and the Co-op's annual meeting on April 27, concerns the Co-op Community Market on Lyme Road in Hanover.

The Community Market is presently closed so that the Co-op can replace it with the first entirely new building the organization has commissioned since the early 1960s. (The Lebanon Co-op Food Store, opened in 1997, is leased from the real estate division of Dartmouth College.) Gone will be the miserable, ugly little former gas station on the site -- to be replaced by a much bigger facility designed by Hanover's UK Architects in association with award-winning grocery store designer James Wasser AIA.

Thanks to the enlightened site planning of Bob White and his colleagues at ORW Landscape Architects and Planners, the new Cooperative Community Market will anchor the emerging Dresden Village district, standing as it does at the traffic circle marking the southern portal of what town planners hope will be, in essence, a second downtown for Hanover. The building does not simply employ "green design" principles -- it will prove that energy efficiency can, and should be, beautiful.

In short, the new Co-op Community Market will be a great setting for the Co-op to do what it does best -- sell excellent groceries while delivering responsive, principled and friendly customer service, in the context of the trustworthy business relationship that arises out of being a merchant that is owned by its customers. And, because the new store, although still small, will be closer to a full-service grocery facility than what was there before, it will have the salutary benefit of relieving some of the pressure on the Co-op's maxed-out flagship establishment a couple of miles to the south.

Hanover, teeming as it is by the miserable wretches who people Jim Kenyon's columns, doesn't deserve all this excellence, according to the Valley News columnist. His complaint is that the Co-op has actually chosen to cooperate with, rather than thwart, the Town's vision for Dresden Village, which Kenyon ridicules as a scheme to turn Lyme Road into "Les Avenue [sic] des Champs-Connecticut."

He prefers a Co-op that is committed to a "cramped and grungy" and therefore "un-Hanoverish" facility that reminds him of a bygone era when he could gas up his Thunderbird for 27 cents a gallon. It was a time when nobody gave a damn about who put what where and town planning meant wondering which side of the Route 12A shopping strip should get the Burger King . . . a time when it wasn't so danged hard to pass the exams at Hanover High School because the local professorate packed its offspring off to St. Paul's or Philips Exeter rather than condescend to the use of free public education.

But I digress. Kenyon is peeved because the Co-op will no longer be selling gasoline at the Lyme Road store. So he lurks at the site, staring nostalgically at the shuttered and soon-to-be demolished concrete bunker, waiting until some hapless soul who hasn't heard about the closing shows up to get gas. When he finally finds his mark, she's too busy to talk to him -- but her failure to serve up a kvetchy quote or two does not deter Kenyon from using the encounter to advance his story. He simply blames the Co-op for that as well (because it caused her to rush off to find gas elsewhere -- likely at the gas station the Co-op isn't closing, two miles away.)

Then Kenyon pursues his quest by asking a couple of local businessfolk for a suitable quote or two, but neither of those fellows oblige him either. One, the owner of a filling station in Lyme, refuses Kenyon's invitation to salivate over the prospect of inheriting gasoline business from the Co-op. The other, identified as someone who "owns a fair amount of retail and office space in town," and thus presumably has no special knowledge to contribute to a discussion of how to run a successful grocery store, nevertheless proclaims that the Co-op is "digging [itself] into a corner" by "putting a grocery store into a convenience store location." Note that the guy doesn't exactly announce that he is going to step into the breach and open a gas station along Route 10 that will serve all of the newly pent-up petro-demand.

According to Jim Kenyon, the Co-op should indulge his bizarre preferences and stick with a recipe for ongoing mediocrity at Lyme Road because the Co-op is a "nonprofit organization." That's "nonprofit organization" as opposed to the "mega supermarket chains" where "the bottom line is . . . always the bottom line."

Here's where the humor column stops being funny.

In fact, a consumer cooperative society is not a nonprofit organization -- it's a business, facing the same competitive pressures and marketplace realities as any other grocery or gasoline retailer. The difference is that at a consumer cooperative society, the customers own the place -- and so the profit, whether tangible or intangible, stays in the community. It is not exported to distant shareholders whose only reason for owning the stock is to get rich.

Yes, the board and management of the Co-op could squander the legacy that thousands and thousands of members have built up over 72 years, justifying such profligacy by proclaiming the organization too noble to break even. Yes, the Co-op could make business decisions only when there is no possibility of disappointing anyone. Yes, the Co-op could embrace Jim Kenyon's vision for the Upper Valley as a place that looks and thinks no differently than it did a half century ago -- a time when, come to think of it, daily newspapers like Kenyon's employer were not swirling toward oblivion because their idea of innovation is wrapping papers for delivery on rainy days in two plastic bags instead of one.

If that's the kind of thinking Jim Kenyon wants to see at the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society, he should seek election to its Board of Directors. He certainly has enough name recognition to prevail in next year's election. And you don't have to pass an exam.