Hello! It's happened again: You've wasted a perfectly good week going about life, and now it's Friday. Well, me too. Though this week, we made a big decision, and said goodbye to a big part of our lives.

Have you heard of the coop? It may seem like a weird question, to ask if you've heard of our local grocery store, but it's actually sorta famous, even nationally. Locally, of course, it's a BFD. Google "Park Slope Food Coop Cult" and look at all the ink that has been spilled on that particular angle. This gem on the Village Voice, "Park Slope Food Coop: The Best Place to Experience How Communism Leads to Facism," sums up the deal pretty concisely:

Part Pavlovian Conditioning, part Stanford Prison Experiment, the PARK SLOPE FOOD COOP, or "the coop," carries the best organic produce in Brooklyn—but you have to earn it. To shop, your entire household must join and stay in good standing (the Pentagon has fewer security checkpoints), so don't miss a work shift or you'll be making up two. To survive, serve your time with the chill comrades stocking the organic beer and meat aisles, and avoid Animal Farm jokes, because they don't have dried mango like this at Key Food.

Let me explain. The coop (I'm not going to use a hyphen, because they don't) is, as the name indicates, a worker-owned grocery collective in my neighborhood. Its tiny shopping space boasts the produce everyone is so into, along with all manner of granola-y goods, including actual granola, homemade pastries, expensive vitamins, free-range eggs, organic Jojoba oil, individual packets of organic, non-GMO, handmade whole wheat cookies and more.

The biggest draw of the coop, for us, what all this stuff at lower prices than our other grocery options. Because it's a coop, they only charge enough enough to cover their costs, not to make a profit. So on things that have a big margin at grocery stores - expensive stuff, like fancy jellies or imported olive oil - you could potentially save a lot. For items that have smaller margins, like milk, you don't save so much, though you still save something. A half-gallon of grass-fed organic milk cost about $4.40 at the coop; organic but not grass-fed milk costs $6/half-gallon (that's not a typo) at our local grocery store. So, depending on what and when you buy, you can save significant amounts at the coop.

Another huge plus, for us? It's around the corner. We have another big grocery store close by as well, but it's nice that the coop is so close. And as a bonus, they offer cart walkers. That is, member-workers who will walk with you to push your groceries back to your house, and then bring the cart back to the store. That allows you schlep home (or to your car), like, five times more than you could just carrying it or precariously balancing it on the back of your stroller, so it's a pretty big perk.

And finally, they offer childcare. Mostly, childcare exists to allow those members who are working a shift to park their kids. But if there's room in the childcare room, shoppers can make use of it, too, and any parent who's ever sneaked off to Giant at 10 pm on a Friday knows just how liberating shopping without kids can be. It can feel like a downright vacation.

Those are the pros. What's not to love? How could we have said good-bye?

Well.

Let's go in order of straws-breaking-Alexander Camelton's-backs, shall we?

Shopping there sucks. Anyone who has ever shopped at the coop will agree with this statement. It's ironic, because it's a big socialist orgy of socialism and all, but when you're there to shop, you are looking out for Number One only. It's crowded, the aisles are tough to navigate, and everyone adopts the annoying but necessary habit of leaving their carts somewhere while they run around grabbing items. If you want to make progress, you have to abandon all pretense that you have manners or give a crap about your fellow man, grip your cart with determination, and just mow through people.

You think I'm joking, I know. When we first started shopping there, I actually told a fellow grown-up person that she should be ashamed of herself for the way she was plowing through people like some old timey cartoon football player headed for the end zone. People are out for themselves, because they feel they have to be, and if you hang out with any fellow coopers, the ability of the coop to turn perfectly lovely people into monsters is an inevitable topic of conversation.

So that's one downer.

Second, in order to shop there, you have to work there. For most people, that means a 2 hour and 45 minute shift every month. There are a few exceptions, for "maintenance" (read: bathroom cleaning) shifts, which are only 2 hours long, and a couple other shifts that are task, rather than time, oriented. After trying out a bathroom shift, I switched to a childcare shift, which at least allowed me to hang with Westley for the duration of my shift. Doing the childcare shift was pretty much fine - I actually do like kids - but the time was still tough. My shift was smack dab in the middle of West's nap, and once that nap was missed, it was pretty gone for the day. Also, 2 hours and 45 minutes is a long time to be cooped up in a small room! Because I'm a big baby? I don't know, but after three shifts and three missed naps, I was feeling veeeery grumpy about the coop.

But having to do my shifts did not, in fact turn out to be the proverbial straw. Nope, that was Bret's. Because he travels so much for work, Bret does his shifts all in a bunch twice a year. So, around Christmas, he did six shifts at the co-op, which got him through to this month. I was not exactly pleased that he came home from a three-week stint in China and headed straight to stock shelves at another job, but I wanted to be positive, and he seemed to have a positive view of the experience - it's a mindless, discrete task, which can feel good sometimes - so we soldiered on with the coop.

As we approached Bret's time to work his shfits, I'd been lobbying harder and harder to quit. The prospecto f Bret working another six shifts was crazy to me, and I didn't want to work my shifts, either! Then, when Bret came home last Saturday, having scheduled a double for that afternoon, I was like, "Whaaaaaat??? You're going to spend 5 1/2 hours at the coop today on a family day when we never see you? For cheap saffron? That's INSANE." But no, he was quick to assure me, it would only be four hours: he'd signed up for a maintenance shift.

You guys. The thought of Bret cleaning someone's bathroom that was not ours almost made my head explode. Like, I thought my head might actually explode. Bret may have also thought so?

So we quit.

Yesterday, I went for our very last shopping trip.

It was a blast. A part of me became nostalgic even as I weighed the virtues of wholewheat versus high-protein small-batch locally made slider rolls, knowing that I would only have one option at other local stores, and that they would be more expensive to boot. Meanwhile, the kids were upstairs, happily playing. And then, after I had bought everything I had ever been curious about at the coop, someone helped me wheel all that crap home.

It was, in other words, a perfect coop day. But you know what? It's better to go out on a high note, right? Now I can have warm, fuzzy feelings about it, and look back on it fondly, and enjoy the months and months worth of snacks I bought, and we'll just move right along. We probably only need one local whole grain slider roll option anyway.

That was long. Thanks for staying with it. You may have seen a theme in this week's missives: We're all about streamlining things and making more time for ourselves right now. It's awesome. Et tu? What are y'all up to to improve your daily lives?