In the 1970s and ‘80s, the Berkeley Co-op was the largest and most successful consumer cooperative in the US. The ranks of people who were active in the Co-op and went on to make other important contributions to the community, reads like a who’s who of the Berkeley progressive community for five decades. Yet after fifty years, it collapsed and died. What happened? This is a series of articles I wrote for the Co-op newspaper as it struggled through its final year. (Co-op News, 1987)