When you talk about coops, there is a distinction between a consumer coop and a worker coop. A consumer coop is generally where consumers band together to get better prices on consuming some product or group of products. A worker coop is where workers have ownership and make business decisions together. There are actually other coops too - e.g. farming coops are generally capital equipment sharing arrangements - think sharing ownership of the processing center for some crop. (Also ESOP worker coops - but I would say they generally are very weak on workers making significant decisions).

REI is a consumer coop. At least some of their employees are actually unionized. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/02/rei-coop-union-...

According to their Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REI), REI is a "consumers' co-operative". This is a different thing than a "workers' cooperative". My understanding is that most grocery co-ops are organized as consumers co-ops, or something close to it.

The grocery co-op near me has occasionally faced the prospect of the formation of an employee/worker union. I imagine that unionization is a thing that doesn't happen (or get seriously discussed) in a workers' co-op.

I find this distinction vaguely fascinating, but (apparently) not enough for me to actually get informed about it.