ENGLISH CO-OPERATIVE STORES.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3127, 25 February 1879, Page 4

ENGLISH CO-OPERATIVE STORES.

When once the system of treating the shareholders as proprietors, and not simply as creditors of the store, has become established, the customers have no longer any guarantee either for the cheapness or for the excellence of their goods. They are no longer making their purchases at a cooperative store; they are making them at a shop kept by a joint stock company. The proprietors of the shop have precisely the same interest in raising the price and depreciating the quality of the goods sold that any other retail tradesman has. It is no answer to say that a body of respectable shareholders will not charge exorbitant prices or send out poor or adulterated goods. No more, in the nature of things, will a respectable tradesmen; and yet, somehow, very high prices have been charged before now, and very inferior goods sent out, by highly respectable tradesman. The merit of a co-operative store was supposed to be that the purchaser was insured against these dangers by the natural working of the system; no one had any motive in selling inferior goods, because only a strictly proportionate price could be charged for them; no one had any interest in charging exorbitant prices because whatever was left over after expences of management and interest on capital had been paid was returned to the customers. Now both these guarantees are gone, and with them has gone the advantage of dealing at a co-operative store. It is for the customers to consider whether they intend any longer to put up with this charge.—Pall Mall Gazette.