"Fast forward through four decades of tortuous Bay-area foodie in-fighting and radical politics and Rainbow has emerged at the top of the lentil pile, with a corporate structure very much its own: 260-odd workers (there are no "employees") across 14 autonomous departments, with an annually elected committee representing each (to qualify as a corporate member with a vote, you have to work for 1,000 hours or nine months, attend "orientations" and – gulp – pass a membership test). There is an elected board of directors drawn from the workers, but as Kemp and Gilmore admitted while extolling the virtues of Rainbow's egalitarian ethos, it can take an awful long time to get anything done. And though he says there's capacity to expand the current Rainbow Grocery operation, Gilmore believes a collective is as only strong as its personal relationships, which would suffer with the advent of a chain of stores."

The UK's The Independent ponders San Francisco's Rainbow Grocery Cooperative.