MARLOW CROSSING, Conn. — The Marlow Crossing Cooperative Grocery held an 11-hour general membership meeting Wednesday to decide whether to hold a 12-minute meeting about the lid on the store’s compost bin, ending at 11:48 p.m. with a consensus to reconvene “last Tuesday, so we can have already listened.”
Sixty-one of the co-op’s 212 member-owners attended, 21 more than the 40 required for a quorum. Facilitator Margo Fenn, 57, opened the meeting at 12:48 p.m. by asking members to “hold space” for the agenda, which they did for 22 minutes. Motion 1, to adopt the agenda, was amended 14 times and withdrawn at 3:06 p.m. after a member said he did not feel “centered by the verb.”
Agreement was signaled by jazz hands, which the co-op uses in place of voting because, in Fenn’s words, “a vote is a winner and a loser, and a hand shimmer is just a mood.” A volunteer counted 1,914 shimmers over the course of the day. The meeting passed to a break at 5:30 p.m., which lasted 41 minutes, 17 of them devoted to what the schedule called “decompressing about the break.”
“I just want to name something,” said Hollis Brandt, 38, a member-owner and graphic designer, during the sixth hour, holding the meeting’s talking object, a wooden spoon. Brandt named that he had named something earlier, and that he wished to name that. He was thanked for naming it.
At 9:14 p.m., the co-op reached what Fenn called “a thin consensus”: that the compost lid issue should be taken up at a 12-minute meeting, to be scheduled at a later meeting. Brandt said he could live with that. Fenn asked whether anyone could not live with it, and a member in the back said she could, but would “need to process it first,” which took 54 minutes.
At 10:20 p.m., members discovered that agenda item 2 had been reached before item 1 began. A member who identified herself as Joan Whitcombe, 62, was seated at the front of the room, having arrived from the previous Tuesday, where she had attended an earlier version of the meeting. Whitcombe said she had objected to the outcome of that meeting and had come forward to be heard in this one. Members thanked her for the context and noted she had left her scarf there.
“We are not slow. We are thorough in both directions,” Fenn said. Whitcombe was invited to hold the spoon, and did, then returned to last Tuesday, where she is reported to be still objecting.
Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University, said the co-op’s consensus model traces to a 1743 dispute over the proper distance between two pews. “The scholarship is clear that a process this thorough has never concluded, by design,” Achterberg said. “In my own scholarship, which I wrote, the meeting is not a means. It is the destination, and the destination is a folding chair.”
The 12-minute meeting is scheduled for last Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the store’s back room, between the bulk bins and the bulletin board. According to the posted minutes, which were approved by shimmer, it ran 11 hours and ended with a consensus to schedule it. The compost lid remains off the bin. A hand-lettered sign taped to the bin reads, “We are listening.”