CHAIN STORES

Grey River Argus, 16 October 1936, Page 11

CHAIN STORES

TO WIPE OUT INDIVIDUAL ONES. CO-OP VIEWS. (Per Press Association). WELLINGTON. October 15. A defence of co-operative trading was made by A. IV. Free, giving evidence, to-day, at the Chain Stores .inquiry, on behalf of the New Zealand Co-operative Alliance, of which he was a director. He claimed that the individual store must die out, and said legislation to prevent its extinction at the expense of the chain and departmental stores would be on a par with the machine breaking of lire last century. Dealing with the structure of co-operative trading, he said it was positively non-monopolis-tic. The tendency was towards coordinated distribution units, particularly through the establishment of company chains on one hand and consumers’ co-operative, societies on the other. In between were the individual traders’ co-operative. buying organisations. These would tend to disappear, and it would then be a contest between the dictatorship of the company and the democracy of the consumers’ co-operative concerns. A public company with a nominal capital of .£300.000 was registered in New Zealand yesterday., under the name Selfridges (N.Z.) Ltd. The objects of the concern are to conduct a chain store business in the Dominion. The company intends to spend £lOO,OOO on the first of its chain stores. The first stores will be established in the four main centres, and others in the smaller centres later. Negotiations are being carried out at. present, for a. central site in Wellington. A large proportion of the shares will be held by Self ridges (Australasia), Ltd. Mr F. N. Harper, co-m'an-aging director of the Australian company, arrived in Wellington on Nlonday" by the “Awatea.” Immediate steps were taken to register the company.