Canoes in Prospect Park. Flickr photo by Megnyc.

Visit every bowling alley in Brooklyn, compete in the Punderdome, hit every spot on our Brooklyn brunch list– these are the Brooklyn things I resolve to do this year. Also: find a viable alternative to the Park Slope Food Coop, go to one workshop at Etsy labs and one weird meetup. I will bike that path along the Belt Parkway, wherever it starts. I will kayak on the Gowanus Canal. Maybe. I will canoe at Prospect Park. I will do as much free yoga as I can get to. This is the year I finally set foot inside the River Café, if only for a drink, get my butt to Roberta’s, eat a Peter Pan red velvet donut and go to Bed-Stuy to try doubles, a Trinidadian spicy chickpea sandwich of sorts. This summer I will trek out to Rockaway Taco and that truck in Sunset Park. I’m going to judge for myself whether Montreal bagel from Mile End deserve the hype. even if the Brokavore wasn’t impressed. I am going to volunteer in Brooklyn.

What are your Brooklyn resolutions for 2012?

Hey girl, is this meme getting tired, or is that just cuz we were up all night?

First Ryan Gosling went feminist, then he got all typographical, and now, the hey-girl propositioning meme featuring the populist choice for sexiest man alive has come, inevitably, to Park Slope. And where else but everyone’s favorite non-corporate cooperatively owned grocery store? Ladies, feast your non-GMO eyes on Food Coop Ryan Gosling. Ry Guy loves him some sustainably sold produce, but don’t start bitching to him about how you got suspended.

Thanks to Tom Sullivan for the tip!

SJP actually grew up poor and describes herself as sometimes “super-frugal” in this really interesting interview in the New York Times from 2000, just as Sex and the City was becoming the phenom that paid for Jennifer Connelly’s old house. And anyway, gossiping about Matthew and Sarah is totally free, making it one more item to add to our list of things that still make Park Slope as good as anyplace else to be broke, even with a couple more millionaires living in the midst. The other reasons:

1) You can save on grocery bills by nursing your entire family and nobody will give you a second look.

2) The food at the CHIPS soup kitchen rivals Rosewater’s on some nights and the Franciscan nuns are hella cool.

3) Fence fashion. We know someone—a great dresser, even—who plucks all of her clothing off of fences in the Slope on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Maybe SJP will toss out a few crumbs herself.

4) No job? Start a blog. Type Park Slope Blog into Google and you get more than 2 million hits, but still unclaimed URLS as of Monday 3 a.m. include: TheStraightSlope.com, NoSlopeRadio.com, SlopeOpera.com, SlopeScum.com (that’s a goodie–if you don’t grab it quick, FuckedinParkSlope will). Also up for grabs: ParkSlopeDad.com and ParkSlopeMom.com. How are they still available?

5) If you can’t afford organic food for your kids, send them to the tot lot with a McDonald’s bag and watch the fruit-juice-sweetened, non-GMO snacks fly their way.

6) Free shows every night—inside the Richard Meier building. (Yes, some people call it Prospect Heights, we call it Upper Park Slope North.)

7) Pizza. Every slice from Flatbush to the Prospect, Fourth Avenue to Prospect Park West, ranked here by surface area, weight, and other key factors.

8 ) Up to four hours a day of free childcare at the Park Slope Food Coop—or 28 hours a week! You’re not supposed to leave the building…

9) The Qi Gong massages at Sunshine Best Body Work (4 Park Place, 718-783-1268.)

10) Really nice kids’ things for sale on the street (below).

11) What’s your reason?

Fairway photo by Gretchen Muller

We’ve long been defenders of the Park Slope Food Coop, but the place has been a raging nut house lately. According to the Linewaters’ Gazette, the coop’s biweekly newsletter, membership is up 10 percent in the last year, causing aisle gridlock, endless lines and a pervasive crankiness about the place. Do coop members really save enough to make it all worthwhile? Not necessarily. We crunched some numbers. 

The obvious alternative to the coop is Fairway, since so many other Brooklyn food stores are either crazy-expensive boutiques or weird-smelling chains. But isn’t Fairway much pricier than the venerable hippie holdout? With the help of Brokelyn contributor Gretchen Muller, we recently price-checked a sample basket of grocery items at each store (current prices may vary). Here’s what we found:

COOP / FAIRWAY

1 pound bag baby spring lettuce mix
$5.16  /  $5.99

1 pound seedless green non-organic grapes
$1.96  / $1.49

1 quart Spectrum organic canola oil
$8.12  /  $10.79

1 pound Murray’s boneless, organic chicken breasts
$4.98   / $5.69

Sabra hummus with pine nuts
$3.87 / $4.79

Applegate Farms fire-roasted red pepper sausage
$5.67 / $5.99

YoBaby yogurt six-pack
$3.33 / $3.89

Half-gallon Tropicana orange juice
$3.36 / $3.69

1 8-ounce Philadelphia bar cream cheese
$2.19 / $2.49

Newman’s Own roasted garlic sauce
$2.53 / $2.49

Bonne Maman apricot preserves
$3.32 / $3.69

Seventh Generation laundry detergent
$13.58  (for 100-ounce box) / $15.98 (2 50-ounce boxes)

Annie’s shitake vinaigrette
$4.30 / $5.49

Solgar B complex 100 vitamins/100 caps
$9.48 / $16.72

1 six-pack Blue Point toasted lager
$8.16 / $9.99

Ben & Jerry’s coffee heath bar crunch
$3.48 / $3.79

And so the grand total is:
FOOD COOP: $83.49
FAIRWAY: $102.96

Based on our very random sample, Fairway prices are a not insignificant 23 percent more than the coop’s. So now let’s take a hypothetical couple, coop members, and say they spend $100 a week on groceries for a total annual expenditure of $5,200. The same groceries would have cost them 23 percent more at Fairway, or about $1,200 more. So far, so good. But there’s another thing to consider—the coop’s work requirement. Each adult member of the household has to work 2.75-hour shift a month, which adds up to roughly a week a year.

Basing the decision to join or not to join the coop on cold hard math alone, the household’s total labor must be worth less than $1,200 a week, or $62,400 a year for the coop to be a good deal.

If you take away the vitamins, which account for the biggest difference in prices between the coop and Fairway, the spread drops to 16.5 percent, or roughly $860 over the course of the year. Using the same math, that makes the coop a worthwhile business decision for a household whose labor is valued at less than that amount per week, or roughly $44,700 a year. (These calculations assume, of course, that you attend all of your shifts and don’t wind up owing extra ones. If you miss a shift and don’t replace yourself, coop policy requires you to work an extra one to maintain your shopping privileges.)

But if you spend more, the coop is worth more to you, obviously. If our vitamin-loving couple spends $200 a week at the coop, they could make up to $124,800 a year for it to be worthwhile. Our non-vitamin couple, spending $200 a week, and saving roughly $2,400 a year, could make up to just over $89,000 a year.

Of course there are lots of other benefits to coop membership that math alone can’t account for: free childcare when you shop, exceptionally high quality meat and produce, the entertainment value of the general meetings, convenience if you live in the Slope and don’t have a car, etc. But is it really worth the growing hassle?