[HN Gopher] Exeter's unassuming co-op worker leads double life a...
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Exeter's unassuming co-op worker leads double life as 'Lord of the
Logos'
Author : summoned
Score : 93 points
Date : 2025-04-05 15:54 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.devonlive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.devonlive.com)
| flippant wrote:
| Archived copy
|
| https://archive.is/JbtH8
| m463 wrote:
| so exeter co-op is a grocery store?
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Co-op is a UK supermarket chain and the brand used for the food
| retail business of The Co-operative Group, one of the world's
| largest consumer co-operatives.
|
| This is the Exeter branch.
| mattl wrote:
| There's multiple different businesses doing business as "the
| co-op" in the UK IIRC, somewhat based on geography but with
| different branding too.
| gerdesj wrote:
| There are these ones in the UK these days:
|
| https://www.co-operative.coop/about-us/history
| https://www.co-operativebank.co.uk/about-us/
|
| When a Brit talks about "The Co-op", they (we) mean the
| stores. The bank always has bank appended to its name.
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| Yes. Exeter is a city in England. Co-op (short for "co-
| operative") is a chain of grocery stores that was originally
| founded on principles of shared ownership [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Co-operative_brand
| treetalker wrote:
| Logos as in corporate designs, not Greek / Christian _logos_.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| "Corporate designs" is technically accurate, but more
| specifically he primarily makes logotypes for heavy metal bands
| and other musical acts. A very cool, inspired pursuit.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Yeah I totally thought this was going to be about some new
| religious or spiritual movement.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Heavy metal logos, not corporate logos.
| arpinum wrote:
| I'll pop in tomorrow and see if he does corporate logos
| columb wrote:
| My time to shine! I used to work with Krzysiu (Krzysztof). He
| used to have MySpace popular page and he was designing logos for
| heavy-metal bands - sometimes (if not always) for free. Really
| nice guy. Oh, and Exeter got to the front page...
|
| Czesc Krzysiu! Pozdrawiam (We used to work at COOP HB)
| mattl wrote:
| Wasn't expecting to see Exeter on the homepage for sure.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Is this guy why every metal band logo looks like a bundle of
| twisted sticks? Or maybe he's just particularly successful at it.
| senderista wrote:
| Emperor's logo is indeed iconic. Shame that just like most of the
| bands he's made logos for, he can't live on his art.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| Legend! Seems like he might be a bit of a savant type though. Sad
| to hear that he's working at a supermarket. He started getting
| attention about a decade ago thanks to social media and had an
| artbook published, but despite his cult status and having some
| big name clients he would charge like 30 bucks to draw them a
| logo.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| > Sad to hear that he's working at a supermarket.
|
| I wouldn't be too hasty to call someone's job sad, unless they
| actually hated it.
|
| From the article:
|
| > [...] Christophe relies on the steady income of his job at
| the Co-op serving customers. He is contracted to do 12 to 20
| hours a week, [...]. He said: "The reason I will never be able
| to fulfil my dream to be living exclusively off my art is
| because of the competition there now is so I have to have two
| sources of income.
|
| And specifically:
|
| > "Working at the Co-op also helps me maintain contact with the
| outside world as otherwise you can be immersed in your own art
| world. As long as my tummy is full and I have a roof over my
| head, that is the most important thing."
| anticorporate wrote:
| I worked at a food co-op for the first three years of my
| career. After spending the next dozen or so years in tech,
| I'm now reapplying to co-op grocery jobs.
|
| Money isn't everything.
| vvpan wrote:
| As they say - name checks out. I have been really into the
| idea of cooperatives lately. It is a topic that deserves
| more light seeing the extreme centralization of corporate
| wealth. Sadly most non-legal info about co-ops out there
| always goes back to Mondragon. There needs to be more media
| about non-corporate organizations. US farming and
| electrification was largely driven cooperatives, for
| example, but one rarely hears much about it.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Yeah money isn't everything after you made a bunch. What.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| He does what he loves while without having to be "hungry" or an
| unstable lifestyle and unpredictable.
|
| That sounds like the definition of success to me.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I wish I worked a simple manual labor job like a supermarket.
| It's just hard to make a living wage, savings, retire, pay for
| unexpected high costs for transportation or health care, and I
| wouldn't be able to travel. Otherwise it would be great.
| Stacking boxes all day? Helping customers with their bags?
| Doing inventory? Checking people out at the register? A simple
| job where I don't have to sit in a chair, can plan, organize,
| do rote manual tasks, socialize, and help people? Sign me up.
| Heck I might even do it part time when I retire.
| y42 wrote:
| yeah I tried to read the article, but somehow it's hard to see
| the content beyond a full screen ad inside a modal, a second
| modal asking me to allow notifications, an inline WhatsApp
| banner, a fixed ad in the footer,four display ads fencing the
| first paragraph and at this point I kind of gave up.
| wffurr wrote:
| Yeah this seems like a fun article but it's buried under way
| too much adtech crud, and Chrome Android has no "reader view" I
| can find. Maybe I need a better user agent that actually
| respects the user.
| Liquix wrote:
| Iceraven is an unofficial fork of Firefox for Android
| maintained by Mozilla, allows installation of desktop
| extensions (full uBlock origin): https://github.com/fork-
| maintainers/iceraven-browser
| switch007 wrote:
| It's an ad blocker testing site that occasionally has some news
| sieste wrote:
| Funny to see this on the front page. When my son was a baby, I
| carried him in a sling and got my morning coffee from Christophe
| in the coop next door. Every day he greeted me with "It's the
| tired kangaroo man!"
| lukecarr wrote:
| A DevonLive article on HN: this must be one of the four horsemen!
| dmje wrote:
| Ah, town of my teen years, hidden under 300 pop ups and adspam
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(page generated 2025-04-05 23:00 UTC)