Why would the workers be unusually wealthy? They can always get a business loan, a bank is going to be relatively confident if you're buying the same business you have worked in for years and know all the ins and outs.

Do you have evidence to back up that claim? I would imagine that only a minority of coops are actually founded by existing workers, and the majority would be new companies - certainly this is the experience I've had with worker coops near me. But it would be interesting if that wasn't the case.

EDIT: the France study is particularly interesting because they specifically talk about this as a potential reason for the surprising longevity, but then point out that "the overwhelming majority of cooperatives are created from scratch, and hence this explanation remains incomplete".

Some of the studies do try and control for the type of business, and the effect still seems to come through. Feel free to click through the sources - that's why I provided the Wikipedia link, because I was too lazy to copy all of their sources into my comment! ;)

And yet evidentially, they aren't so very fragile. Clearly there's something about coops that make them viable businesses, even if that goes against our intuition for what viable businesses ought to look like.

I think part of it is that workers typically have very good insights into the immediate needs of a business. You bring up technical debt as an example of the dangers that businesses face, but technical debt is famously a problem that is noticed initially by the workers, and only later by the business as a whole (as velocity falls and new features start becoming painfully slow to implement). The companies that handle technical debt the best are typically the ones where developers are given the freedom and flexibility to make decisions regarding paying off that debt.

Similarly, you might expect that when the small problems in a restaurant show up, it's the workers who will notice them first. And the point of a coop is that those workers then have both the motivation (it's their business) and the power (it's their business) to fix those problems immediately, rather than being forced into handling less relevant tasks by a management that doesn't have full visibility of the problem.

Fwiw, I'm a fan of the idea of worker coops, but I don't think it's the only setup that works, nor necessarily the best setup in ever case. But worker democracy as a whole - the idea that workers in a company must have a right to contribute to the decisions of that company - seems both moral, and also practically very useful. If you want a good overview on this topic, I recommend the YouTuber Unlearning Economics, who has a whole video on worker democracy and what different forms of it look like (and what the costs and benefits of those forms are):

https://youtu.be/yZHYiz60R5Q?si=t4Q9qQLc9K7wsIx_

There are plenty of non worker owned restaurants doing the same in today’s economy, of course.

Non-chain restaurants are kind of weird businesses, really. Owner owned or worker owned they’re rarely big money spinners and often owe a lot to the community around them to keep them viable.

Idk how Cheese Board is doing. They were fine last I checked. Just probably would've done way better as a corp. The Avedisyan couple turned their cheese shop into a coop decades ago, and it was basically an act of charity when they could've kept ownership instead. The store didn't expand much despite decades of exceptional work and high popularity, which is a missed opportunity for profit, but that wasn't their goal. I do wonder where they got the initial investment for the shop.