CREDIT CLUBS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 157, 20 May 1909, Page 4

CREDIT CLUBS.

A correpondent of the "Daily Mail" gives a detailed account of certain curious financial institutions of the English province?, known as "Clothing Clubs." The clubs have nothing directly to do with supplying clothes. They have no shops. They are simply credit clubs, giving credit to men who

wish to buy goods, and they make their profit out of the buyer and seller. The comraision collected from the buyer is equal to about forty per cent, per annum on the credit lent,and the profit drawn from the tradesmen averages about 3s 6d in the pound There ar fully fifty of these institutions in Bradford. Fourteen of the principal of them are organised into a "Club Proprietors' Association." There is an elaborate system of black listing persons who fail to pay up weekly instalments, and the buyer who does not meet his debt to one club cannot afterwards obtain credit with any. Besides the Bradfford clubs there are hundreds of others all over Yorkshire and Lancashire. Some are strictly local, while others have branches throughout the United Kingdom. The profits are so enormous that all kinds of men have been attracted into this scramble for easy money. Some of the proprietors were originally mill hands who saved a ten pound note and then organised little credit clubs among their mates. They soon found that lending paid better than working. The largest of all the clubs is the Provident, of Bradford, which has a turnover of nearly a million sterling a year, and operates as far afield as Cardiff and Aberdeen. The method is simply to collect a shilling weekly for each pound's worth of goods purchased. If the borrower pays an extra shilling he may purchase at once; if not, he must pay seven or eight shillings before he receives his credit note. Most of the subscribers pay the extra shilling. The institutions are sound enough financially. Collectors and canvassers do all the work and of course they take steps to ascertain the character of a would-be subscriber. The Provident is said to have started with £7 as capital and now it has eighty four branches, thirteen of them being in London.