I swept floors, stocked vitamins, cleaned kale, stamped receipts, deposited money in a vault, scraped gum off the floor with a razor blade  and left with my affordable bag of Valencia oranges and a renewed sense of community.

Two years in, I scored the coveted role of “exit worker,” examining the receipts of departing members and performing the occasional bag check. At one point, the job was amended to prohibit bag checks for fear of racial profiling  a change that worked out well for me since I would never dream of asking members to open their backpacks. (Nor had anyone instructed me what to do if I found a shoplifter  give chase? Make a citizen’s arrest?)

Instead, I had always interpreted the exit worker’s station as more of a farewell post, wishing members a good evening, perhaps offering an encouraging word about what we were all doing to make the planet better, leaving them smiling after the long lines. But as membership surged  it was 8,000 when I joined  I found myself sharing what I had come to imagine as my personal concierge booth with a superfluous co-exit worker. Fortunately for me, she also was not particularly security conscious.

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While similar food co-ops across the nation often hire nonmembers for checkout positions or other tasks, in Park Slope, members carry 75 percent to 80 percent of the workload, according to Joe Holtz, the general manager.

Such a relatively high workload, not surprisingly, leads to high rates of, well, shirking. “We knew there would be people who would try to drive a truck through the work-requirement rule,” Mr. Holtz said in an interview, “and we have to protect ourselves against that.”

I can hear you thinking, “A few hours every four weeks? Give me a break.” I know it sounds easy to keep up with the commitment. All I can say is, for me and many other members with good intentions, it isn’t.

Whenever last-minute conflicts arose  a late night at the office, a grad-school deadline  I would scramble to find a replacement, but often I would end up in the hole.