Member
Worker Profile:
Ian Eckardt-Rigberg
by
Deborah Trupin
Ian
Eckardt-Rigberg is
perhaps the youngest working member of Honest Weight Food Co-op right
now. In
July Ian turned 14, the youngest age at which a member can work, and
since the
fall he has been a weekly worker in the grocery section. From all
accounts, Ian
is a quick and energetic worker—his supervisor, grocery floor manager
Josh
Frank, says “He’s fantastic!” Ian says there is no part of his work at
HWFC
that he doesn’t like, even if it is sometimes frustrating when the
pricing guns
don’t work right. He says his favorite part of working at HWFC is
seeing people
he knows. He said that one week he saw seven people he knew in only a
half hour!
Of course, at 14,
Ian is working as part of a
family of Co-op members. He comes by his co-op involvement
naturally—his parents,
Chris Eckardt and Saul Rigberg, have been active in HWFC since they
moved to Albany
just over 20 years
ago. Before that they had been active in food co-ops in other cities.
Saul
expressed his pride in Ian’s work at HWFC: “Ian’s work at the Co-op is
helping
him to develop self-esteem, responsibility and independence, as well as
a sense
of accomplishment and pride in contributing to the HWFC community.” I
asked Ian
about his earliest memory of Honest Weight and he told me he can
remember, just
barely, being carried in a backpack in the old store and how very
crowded it
was!
Speaking of crowded,
Ian, like most other
member workers I’ve spoken with, said that the current store is also
becoming too
crowded. He thought it would be great to take over the Family Dollar
store at
the front of our building, or find some other place where we would have
more
room.
Ian has many
favorite products at
Co-op—actually, he has whole favorite sections. He mentioned the fruit,
the
chip aisle and the yogurts. A lifelong vegetarian and a very good cook
and
baker, Ian is also familiar with many of the somewhat more obscure
products
that HWFC carries. He accompanied me as I did some shopping after our
interview. I was buying quinoa, and was telling him that it was “sort
of like
millet.” He reminded me that he had one time made a quinoa broccoli
quiche from
a recipe he had gotten from Nate Horwitz. I then remembered that he had
actually given me the recipe for it!
When he is not
working at HWFC, Ian is a
9th-grader at Bethlehem
Central High School. Besides his
parents, Ian’s family
includes his 12-year-old sister Soojee, their Shi-tzu (Tae-jon—named
after the
city in Korea
where both Ian and Soojee were born), and several other small pets (a
hamster and
two mice, for now). Ian and his family enjoy camping, often with
several other
HWFC families, at Rollins Pond campgrounds in the Adirondack Park
each summer. He is a superbiker, having completed three or four century
rides
(100 miles in one day) in the last two years, including the Tour de
Cure, a fundraiser for the American Diabetes
Association. Since he was very young, Ian has been a huge train fan, an
activity we have shared for many years—our biggest adventure so far has
been
taking the overnight train to Chicago.
(Full
disclosure, for those
who haven’t guessed—I have known Ian since the day he arrived in the
U.S at the
age of four months. To him and Soojee, I’m “Aunt Deborah.”) When I
asked Ian if
he thought he’d like working at another store, such as Hannaford’s, he
said,
“No!” He said it didn’t seem that the people working at Hannaford’s
were
friendly, that they didn’t seem to smile. He added that he liked
working at
HWFC partly because it was less corporate. If we had lots of teenage
member-workers like Ian, HWFC would definitely not have to worry about
its
future!
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