HOLLYWOOD — The first note payment cleared on Friday, and Genoveva Aparicio, board president of a bakery she has floured for nineteen years and owned for one month, marked the occasion in the manner of her office.
“I initialed a bank statement,” she said. “Nineteen years I made bread and the bread was the proof of the day. Now I initial statements. The statement is also proof of the day. It is less warm.”
One month into its life as a cooperative, the Melrose Avenue bakery sold in July by Hyacinth and Bento Okonjo-Ferreira to its own eleven employees is, by the measures available, succeeding at the modest thing it set out to do first: continue existing. August revenue came in flat against last August, which the group’s lender had told them to consider a victory in a transition month. Nobody quit. Nobody was fired, there being no longer anyone to do the firing in the old sense. The wholesale route ran every morning at 4 a.m., as it has for decades, pending the argument about it.
The argument — whether to keep the low-margin route that supplies nine restaurants and two markets, or drop it and sleep — remains scheduled for its October vote, and remains, the group says with some pride, exactly where they agreed to leave it. Nothing has changed on the route in the meantime, per the truce. What has changed is the argument itself, which acquired a third position in August when the driver, one of the eleven, proposed splitting the route: keep the five accounts within a mile, surrender the four that drag the truck across town, and start at five instead of four.
“So now we are three factions,” Ms. Aparicio said. “Keep, drop, and Aurelio’s compromise, which is sensible, which in a bakery is a suspicious quality in an argument. We will vote in October like civilized people. Until then everyone gets to campaign at the bench. The bread has opinions now. It is a different workplace.”
Her own August education has continued along the lines she dreaded in July. “Wheat is down,” she reported. “I know why wheat is down. I resent that I know why wheat is down. There is a woman inside me who only wants to laminate dough, and I have sent her to meetings.”
As for the sellers, retirement is proceeding at partial success. The Okonjo-Ferreiras, who carried most of the note themselves and whose monthly income now depends on the shop they no longer run, have adopted a policy of coming in only as customers. The policy held for eleven days.
On the twelfth, the proofing cabinet’s thermostat began to drift — the same 1980s cabinet, older than either of the couple’s children, that Bento Okonjo-Ferreira had to be led away from on the day of the sale. He appeared the following morning at six, in civilian clothes, ordered a coffee, drank half of it, and was discovered forty minutes later behind the cabinet with a screwdriver he had brought from home.
“I reminded him it is not our proofer,” Ms. Okonjo-Ferreira said. “He agreed completely and did not come out.”
The board has since voted — its first unanimous act — to designate him the cooperative’s volunteer equipment consultant, a title Ms. Aparicio says was drafted “to make the thing he was going to do anyway legal.” He has accepted the post. He has declined the title on the door.
The note has ten years and eleven months to run. The proofer, its consultant estimates, has five — “six,” he amended, “if they call me early.”