I know people love REI, but whenever I go in there to buy anything that requires someone (ski boots, skis, work on skis) - it sucks. There's never anyone available, it often takes up to an hour or more to get helped or waiting in line. Sometimes I have to leave and come back later. Last time I gave up and ordered everything online.

It's not like it's crazy packed in there either, it's pretty empty - there's just nobody working there.

Co-ops are supposed to be better about aligning incentives, but at least for me I've often had worse experiences as a customer.

Uber and Lyft work pretty well (for the most part, except for when drivers cancel on you) - I'd be surprised if a co-op could pull off a similarly good experience for riders.

In fact, in a consumers' cooperative would probably be better in this case since you would have more direct control over the business than with a regular corporation.

The point of the co-op is that it is much better for the worker. There's no inherent reason why a co-op would need to have any different level of customer service than a corporation. My personal worst customer service experience is at Home Depot for example. I had to wait 45 minutes to get a 4 foot length of hose cut, something that would have been under 5 minutes at my local hardware store (and so I go to the local shop now).

Ideally many stores would be co-ops and they could compete on price, quality, customer service etc like any other business.

Perhaps you're satisfied with the customer experience at Uber, but the situation for drivers seems pretty exploitative. If I can get similar service and the workers get a fair deal, I'd be much happier choosing that.

It's the same thing at a worker cooperative, or for that matter at a heavily unionized workplace: the workers have no incentive to automate themselves out of a job, but may collectively understand that if they don't, the business will go under and they'll all be left without jobs.

I think co-ops can actually be a good way of handling technology replacing manual labor. The profits made from the technological advancements can be put in a dedicated trust of the co-op that is focused on retraining the workers for new positions. With that you could handle inevitable technological progress.

That ownership is contingent on you working for the co-op, which doesn't seem very likely if a robot took your job.

That said, there are a couple ways to work around this:

1. Flip the ownership model to a customer cooperative (or a customer/worker hybrid cooperative), thus moving the decisionmaking - and the incentives as a result - from workers to customers (which can and often do overlap). Customer cooperatives are a proven model here in the US (credit unions are probably the most widely known example).

2. Use automation to multiply labor rather than replace it. Replacing a drivers with cars at a 1:1 ratio obviously doesn't leave much room for drivers, but replacing them at a 1:10 ratio (or somesuch) can mean converting drivers into owner-operators of "squads" of cars. This depends on there being enough of a customer base to warrant this multiplication; for this to work, it's best paired with a massive expansion of that customer base (adding a bunch more cities, for example, or extending service areas, or slashing fares).

Software developers also work on tools that make software development easier.

Any evidence for that? Seems to me this has been 'pet idea' of the labor movement for 200+ years.

Maybe that are more that are visible to the avg person because of the web and social media, but if there are actually more seems highly questionable.