Co-ops in the US seems to be particularly popular in agriculture.
A house I lived in got our electricity from a Touchstone Energy cooperative[1] and our rate was dirt cheap and they even mailed us a dividend check every year. I've even received a few checks from them after moving out of the area and no longer being a customer of theirs. They had great customer service too. They were significantly better in every way than the regional monopolies and municipal power companies I've dealt with.
I got in as a minor, so I paid $5 for my startup share. (Adults are $25). They’ve been giving me a $5 dividend share every year for a few decades.
And charge me $0/month for a pretty full-service bank experience (not common at banks in Canada).
They’re on a North American network of ATMs (Exchange & Accel) so I have pretty good coverage out of town, can even deposit cash/cheques into CDN partner ATMs. In a lot of smaller towns, you can’t bank on every big bank having a branch, but a good chance of a partner credit union.
Much more narrowly, I wonder if it could work for certified flight instructors. Most CFIs are young, know little about business, marketing, tax compliance. And as a consequence are often exploited by employers who misclassify them as independent contractors only to pay them less, without benefits, and still direct their schedules, coerce them into noncompetes. A co-op would help protect their interests while raising standards, in a cost efficient way.
That said, yes there are co-op schools, with the Co-Op School in Brooklyn, NY, being prominent: <https://thecoopschool.org/>
In a very real sense, public schools are already customer-owned cooperatives governed by a set of trustees elected by the customer-owners.
That said, once you have a school owned by the teachers it's no longer a public school. Public schools are funded by and governed by the public. A cooperative school owned by worker-owners is by definition not a public school.
In many jurisdictions, a teacher co-op can already obtain a charter to have an "open to the public, funded by the public, and accountable to the public" charter school. If we're going to be pedantic I think that would fit your funded+governed definition. owned+operatred might be closer to what you are gesturing at though, or perhaps local democratic oversight? Regardless, the old public/parochial types of school categorization is not nearly nuanced enough to be particularly useful for where things are already, let alone soon headed.
Producer co-ops generally are at least somewhat prevalent.
Two notable former examples are Visa and Mastercard (they've since reverted to publicly-traded corporations, in the aughts). Both were originally formed as co-operative ventures among member banks, effectively a producer co-op.
I've looked into worker co-ops previously, and noted that most examples seem to have relatively simple organisational needs, with typical sectors being food-service (restaurants and cafes), publishers, acting troupes, and if memory serves, a political party. Mondragon is notable for being an industrial manufacturing company.
There are also worker-owned (though not necessarily co-operative) businesses, such as Bob's Red Mill (milling and cereal products).
Consumer co-ops saw popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, but have largely faded from view. A niche they had occupied, "natural food store" is now dominated by Amazon through its Whole Foods subsidiary, though there are some independent co-ops still extant, often in quite unexpected locations. Three Rivers Market in Knoxville, TN, comes to mind.
Credit Unions are another often overlooked case of co-ops --- both in terms of being neglected over commercial banks and not being recognised as co-operative businesses.
The Nonprofit Quartery ran a recent article on recent trends in co-ops in 2022:
<https://nonprofitquarterly.org/where-are-new-co-ops-emerging...>
News of a 2015 list of the top 100 US co-ops:
<https://www.thenews.coop/list-top-100-co-ops-usa-released/>
And the 2023 listing: <https://impact.ncb.coop/hubfs/Co-op%20100%202023%20Report%20...> (PDF)
Breakout:
- Ag: 47 firms, $187.6 billion (59%)
- Finance: 17 firms, $39.1 billion (12%)
- Grocery: 8 firms, $33.1 billion (10%)
- Energy: 22 firms, $26.8 billion (8%)
- Hardware: 3 firms, $18.6 billion (6%)
- Other: 3 firms, $13.4 billion (4%)
You missed a chance to mention PCC Community Markets, the USA's largest grocery store co-op, who are also located in Seattle!
(And just like Amazon, PCC was recently in a union labor dispute!)
When a Whole Foods opened across town, they shut down in less than a year largely because of the strength/quality/loyalty of the Davis Food Co-Op.
I think Bob basically gifted the company to the employees (they bought in over 10 years, but at a valuation far lower than Bob could have got selling the company to an acquirer).
Some discussion on the employee ownership here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39374158
REI is a customer co-op, and in the past few years, hasn't exactly been a model employer.
https://www.agweb.com/news/business/technology/almost-half-l...
And agricultural co-ops are neither.
Why this structure? Is it more advantageous in the US?
A trust with the employees as beneficiaries solves a lot of these problems. It also prevents the co-op members from taking the company public for a huge payday.
The point that I was highlighting was that it comes down to the Articles of Incorporation and how ownership is managed on an ongoing basis. What happens when someone retires or you hire someone new.
If I were to retire and simply give my company to my 10 employees, Nothing would stop them from hiring new employees and not sharing ownership, leaving the company and keeping ownership, or selling their ownership to a third party.