RETAIL DISTRIBUTIVE OR CONSUMERS' SOCIETIES Extent and Character.—Consumers' co-operation in Britain has spread far beyond the industrial regions of the Midlands and the North. From Penzance to Wick and Thurso there extends a network of between 1,200 and 1,3oo independent, self-governing, territorial societies, the number decreasing through amalgamations while the societies enlarge. Some have grown enormously, like the London Co-operative Society, which covers an area north of the Thames from Hounslow to Southend-on-Sea, and includes 230,000 members. Others continue as tiny village societies with perhaps less than ioo adherents. In agricultural areas, as around Lincoln and Peterboro, Shrewsbury and Hereford, the society at the centre has branched out over hundreds of square miles. Elsewhere, as in parts of Lancashire, West Yorkshire or Durham, societies, per haps too independent, are crowded together. All are equal in their complete autonomy. Their membership is by no means purely in dustrial. With factory workers, miners and railwaymen, they in clude clerks and professional men, farmers and rural labourers; while the revenues of the peerage have been known to benefit by dividend on purchases. By the older rules, either husband or wife holds the share book. In the newer practice all adults are accepted. It is the C.W.S. of which people hear; but it is these local socie ties which form the basis, and are the chief owners, of the federal institutions.
At the Co-operative Congress of 1928 it was recognized that the societies were too numerous for modern ideas of efficiency, and steps for hastening amalgamations were recommended from the chair; while by a small majority the C.W.S. was authorized to start retail stores from its wholesale centres rather than leave the localities to attempt to create more small societies. All such steps, however, remain subject to the will of the present local societies as composing the governing bodies.
Practically all the consumers' societies have begun with a public meeting, an enrolment of members subscribing capital, the elec tion of a committee of management, and the subsequent purchase or tenanting of a shop by the committee, and the appointment of a paid manager. From selling plain groceries—just as any shop keeper, except for the dividend-check given with every purchase— they have extended to universal supply and to baking, boot-repair ing, tailoring, coal and milk delivery, laundering, dairy-farming and meat production. On the educational and recreative side, the societies maintain libraries, arrange lectures and week-end schools, entertain conferences, distribute their own periodicals, give con certs, dances and entertainments in their own halls, establish choirs, hold mammoth "field days" for their members' children, conduct rambles and motor tours and organize travel guilds. They have outstanding between six and seven millions advanced for house purchase by members, and they own houses worth over three millions. Such services are not all found in every place; for one society will be a "live" one, and another seem content with a rather dull-minded routine shopkeeping. This variation, like the some times varying prices of the societies for the same article, is felt na tionally to be an obstacle. But all these activities widely exist. In general, the societies in Great Britain do not supply intoxicants, and avoid overlapping with their own national institutions in manufacture and insurance. Otherwise they recognize no barriers in the field open to local voluntary association.
government of all the distributive societies is entirely democratic, following usually the model rules of the Co-operative Union. Each member has one vote and only one. Membership rules, and not capital. The new comer with Li invested ranks equally with the holder of shares to the legal limit of f 200. For the committee of management, as for other selected positions, all are equally eligible, except for varying qualifications in respect to the management committee, and these are as likely to be concerned with purchases as with the holding of capital. The Royal Arsenal Society in South London, with 18o,000 members, has a salaried executive, but the usual payment is a small fee for each meeting. Control may be through a group of departmental managers or (the newer practice) a general manager or managing-secretary. Employees as consumers may be members, and the more progressive societies do not debar them from election to the boards of management; joint advisory councils of the man agement committee and the employees exist in certain societies and are officially recommended. Trade union wages and conditions are all but universal, and, since the World War, pension schemes have come into existence. Interest on capital is limited generally to 5% or less, and rules are found that further limit the interest paid to non-purchasing members. Much of the members' capital represents dividends on past purchases, allowed to accumulate with the society. Cash sales in respect to groceries is the general rule ; in other departments practices vary, many societies having introduced instalment clubs and hire-purchase for furniture. In 1926, a sum of four million pounds, or 16/ per member, was due to the societies for goods at the end of the year. It is widely be lieved that the societies are privileged in being excused income tax; but they are, in fact, taxed on their land and numerous buildings, while taxable members are liable to income tax on their share in terest. The only untaxed money is the "disposable surplus," and, whether-paid or reserved, this is legally regarded as a deferred dis count—a saving through buying practically at cost price. A new kind of "income" would need to be defined, a "wage" of the con sumer, earned whenever his pocket benefited by economy in self supply, in order to bring within the limits of any income tax the excess payments revealed in co-operative transactions at each accounting.
That nothing succeeds like success is not always true. The consumers' societies have by no means ousted multiple shops or individual traders. But they have so far prospered as to incur the danger of affluence. Amongst the thousands of members in each locality only hundreds at most at tend the local business meetings. With millions passing through the coffers, many people prefer to befriend causes deemed to be more needy, and voluntary help becomes apt to depend on a few. Employees in turn develop the disposition which led to the short but determined struggle for special wages which occurred between societies and the National Union of Distributive Workers in Lan cashire in 1924; or their co-operative loyalty is overcome by their class loyalty, as in certain areas during the general strike of May, 1926. Yet to infer decadence from these signs would be as idle as for co-operators to see the millennium in a congress vote. What is more important is the really astonishing fact that having begun in 1844 from nothing but tiny incomes and pressing needs, the British retail co-operative societies founded and continued by the "rude unlettered mass" should, for the troubled year of 1926, be able to show members' purchases of £ 184,000,000, a surplus of f 17,000, 00o returned on these purchases, a capital held by members of over f87,000,00o, and a body of workers numbering
In a world deemed to be incurably selfish these figures still constitute a revelation of new social forces.
The Women's Co-operative Guild, founded in England in 1883, with later-born sisters in Scotland and Ireland; the National Co-operative Men's Guild, dating from 1911, and the more recently founded mixed guild, form a core of activity within the consumers' movement. The women's guild, having 58,00o members, and holding an important annual congress, is a self-governing organization mainly of married women, intent on stimulating and organizing the ideas and abilities of the woman in the home, both as a co-operator and a citizen.
