> You're saying this isn't communism because it's not at sufficient scale or depth.
No, communism simply isn’t an attribute that a small store has if it is owned by a local government. If 10,000 small town governments in the US start running their local grocery store that still has nothing to do with communism. Communism is an ideology and movement about establishing a society whose fundamental socioeconomic system is based on common ownership of production and distribution of goods and services.
You keep saying "this is not that, because this is not that" - which is fine and all, but it doesn't make it true.
Please keep telling us what communism is and is not. With how certain you seem to be, these comments will surely end up being cited by a PhD in politics and history
Let me just point out that you think communism is an "attribute" that a shop could have, like OOP is your guiding philosophy for political structure. My gut tells me you aren't splitting hairs between, say, Marxism and positivism when you're spewing this shit from your mouth.
If the workers live in the town - which is highly likely - they can have (substantial, since the town is small) influence in city council.
City council manages the shop.
You could say, then, that the workers can have substantial influence over the management of this shop.
Note that this influence is much more direct than the worker -> shareholder line. Note that this influence is given as a matter of citizenship, rather than wealth.
Is this communism? Maybe not. After all, the goods that the workers stock aren't produced by them (after all, circles don't exist). Political and economic theory is far from solved. Again, if you think communism is an "attribute", I don't really want to engage in further discussion. Doubly so because of your latent assumption that the most widely used definition is the most correct one.