This is one of my favorite quirky Co-op stories

The name of our business is the Co-op Food Stores. (Notice the plucky little “s” in there, indicating more than one of something.) But our website is coopfoodstore.coop. What the heck, right? Why is there no “s” on “coopfoodstore?” PLURALITY, YOU HAVE FAILED US!
 
Here’s the deal:
 
In the mid-to-late 1990s, having a website was a major thing. The New York Times published a front-page story about launching an online edition in 1996. And Google, which may seem as old as the web itself, really isn’t. The celebrated search engine first hit the web in 1998.
 
When our Co-op first made plans to go online in the mid 1990s or so, we had only one food store. We registered a domain long before we launched a site, and coopfoodstore made perfect sense at the time. We weren’t even a dot-coop then. We were a dot-com. Dot-coop domains wouldn’t be available until a few years later.
 
After the site was around a few years, we talked about changing the domain to coopfoodstores. We were more than one location by then. But we never got around to it, and that was that. The domain stuck, and the story behind it passed into Co-op legend.
 
I’ve been here since 2000, long enough to be a surly old-timer, and I enjoy sharing these tales with members. To me, it’s part of the quirky history that makes us so great. People here were thinking about a website before websites were even much of a thing. The missing “s” is a symbol of that, which is why I love our domain just the way it is. 
 

Nourish. Cultivate. Cooperate.

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Ken Davis

Ken Davis is the Co-op's senior copywriter. Email him at kdavis@coopfoodstore.com.