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

Pronounced "coo-op" or "cwop", depending on your accent.

“Ko op” where I’m from, never heard it pronounced any other way

Rhymes with no-op

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.

There’s multiple different businesses doing business as “the co-op” in the UK IIRC, somewhat based on geography but with different branding too.

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.

There's also the funeral care: https://www.coop.co.uk/funeralcare.

Good catch.

My New Year's promise this year was to be more demonstrably accurate than last year and I seem to have screwed it up already.

Bugger.

You can see here what I'm talking about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-op_Food

Different groups of co-operatives sharing "The Co-Op" brand with different but similar branding.

Co-op Food in Devon vs other parts of the UK will be run by a different group.

I went down a Wikipedia hole on this the other day.

Indeed. Sometimes you’ll have two Co-ops from different groups right next to each other: Shipston-on-Stour has a Midcounties Co-op two doors down from a Co-operative Group Co-op. Both are externally branded Co-op, they sell many of the same Co-op branded products, and they don’t take each other’s loyalty/dividend card.

Yes, a village near us has two close by and competing, a mid-counties co-op and a food co-op.