This is from your old backyard, Joe, Chicago's Rainbow Grocery where I was an unpaid/underpaid "independent contractor" volunteer.  And thanks to David Shimburg for helping work out the fine points that allowed us to sign contracts stating we were independent contractors that allowed Rainbow Services (from which he benefited) to pay employees significantly less than the legal minimum wage.

Apparently, Steve Kriston, the manager/owner of Rainbow, sold Rainbow to a major health food chain around 1994 for about $5 million in stock that soon doubled to $10 million.  God, I'm so glad that I was able to serve the Lord in helping feed and clothe the needy people of this World.

The reason I quit Rainbow back whenever was one day the owner/manager was driving the company van up in Wisconsin with his girlfriend and he got a speeding ticket.  I was the acting store money manager and I refused to give him the $70 to cover his speeding ticket because I felt that it was his personal choice to drive too fast and that Maharaji and the patrons or members of Rainbow should not be penalized for his actions.  And, yes, there were members who had to pay yearly memberships to be members of this tax-exempt co-op that funneled money to Maharaji and made a few select people very rich. Sounds pretty criminal to me.

And worse, and it was so funny, but some of the members actually came in the store to help out like it was one of those real food co-ops.  It made me feel pretty creepy because these people didn't know the whole story and they were really neat and well meaning people.

There was something like a lawsuit in Chicago by a competitors of Rainbow (Sherwyins or something like that) that claimed that they were unable to compete and lost signiticant business because the competition, Rainbow Grocery, had the unfair advantage of using Slave Labor to keep costs down.  Yup, it's true.  We were slaves enslaved in bullshit for the sole benefit of liars and theives.

The reason for this letter from Steve Kriston was to allow myself to prove residency in the State of Illinois and independence from my parents so that I would be eligible for student loans so that I could return to college.  To make a long story short, I hated living in Chicago and left the state as soon as I could and moved to Coyote Wells, California where I've managed a trailer for the last 30 or so years.