The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1920-03-29

? erative stores, if taken together, con tain more capital and do larger turnover than any other enterprise, with the possible exception of the liquor industry; in Russia it is the one stable thing which has stood fast through fire and torment, and prom iSeS an avenue for a, resumption of international business.
 Cooperation does not get often in-
 to the newspapers, seldom at all into
 American newspaper. Cooperative
 stores do not advertise; they do not
 need to. Advertisers, of course, do not welcome cooperative stores. Those may not be the reasons for the silence regarding a remarkable plan.
 The birth of modern cooperative stores is romantic enough. In 1S44, twenty-four poor men of Rochdale, in the north of England, most of them flannel weavers. stared haggardly
 into the desperate poverty of the times-for them-and decided to l make an experiment. They appoint
 ed from their number a treasurer, and brought to him their su.bscrip-
 tions, two cents one day, three cents another; in similar amounts they brought these tiny sums from a few others. They scraped together a cap~ itaI of $40.
 Think of it! Twenty-four poor
 flannel weavers, and $40, and a plan
 to revolutionize the business methods 1 of two continents. There is a thrii' at the thought of that meager capital what would it do for you today3-
 and the little store they opened with ! it in Toad Lane, Rochdale.
 1 Yet by 1906 there were 1,4O0 such
 stores in the United Kingdom, and
 their sales for the year exceeded | s315, 100000
 ! The little Lancashire shop at first 1 sought only to supply it's members with their wants-ibacon, candles shoes and so forth; what they actu- ally did, as the idea spread; was to
 improve vastly the position of mil lions of the working class by enabI- ing them to obtain their provisions cheap and pure, to avoid the mill stone of debt, to save money, to pass
 from retail to wholesale trading, and from distribution to manufacturing, building and house-owning and bank
 ing.
 The membership today is nearly 3,000,000. That means three mil
 lion families in the United Kingdom
 upward of 15,Ooo, 900 souls, buy
 as a unit, on the cooperative plan,
 get their little metal checks with their
 purchases, and cash these in at stated
 intervals for their "dividends'' or else build up their bank account, with the Knowledge that their money is
 conservatively used in extending yet
 further the reach of the idea. These workmen's cooperative 1 stores, or distributive societies Gre 1 ferred to as the 'fCo-Op") flourish all 1 over the country; practically all Of ] them are registered under the Indus- 1 trial and Prevalent Societies Act. which constitutes them corporate bodies, with limited liability, and fixes i $1,0e0 as the maximum any member may hold in the share capital , Their government is dem tic, ] based on one vote each, for man or ] woman, their members or sharehold- 1 CTS and the committeeman or direc- i tors are almost exclusively the more l provident of the working class. i Their method is modelled on the 1 original Rochda1e plan, with modifi- i cations It varies slightly in different 1 societies, but the following is a gen
 era1 working basis
 | Membership is open 10 anyone who i pays a small entrance fee CPS cents) | and signs a pledge for a $5 share, | which can be paid for out of the 1 profits. For years it has been possi- l bIe for any member to withdraw his shares in cash at par. With each 1 purchase the member is given metal | discs Sometimes paper) equivalent to 1 the amount spent, and at the end of 1 each quarter this stack of metal discs, | or book of paper coupons, exactly re- presents the members expenditure with the cooperative society during
 that period. At the end of the quar. 1 ter, a limited interest (never more
 than per cent, and frequently less) 1 on shares and, in some societies, pay 1 ing a proportion Of profit to the em- 1 pIoyes, the surplus is divided to the 1 members in proportion to their pur- l chases- In some societies nOn-mem-
 bers can cash in their discs also, but | for half dividends.
 Thus there is every incentive for
 the member to do all the purchasing
 at the "Co-Op'', since the money spen: I becomes sort of a capital, which 1 draws interest in proportion to its
 size; and also there is the incentive