CO-OPERATIVE TRADING.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 182, 3 July 1936, Page 8

CO-OPERATIVE TRADING.

Co-operative stores do not appear to have had me same vogue in New Zealand as in some countries. To be sure mere are some co-operative stores, but speaking generally mere lias been no large scale development of tlie movement.. instead, we have chain stores which m tlie main belong to joint stock companies. The oniy real development has been in me dairy industry with its cooperative butter and cheese factories. In Europe co-operative stores owned by consumers are a feature. In fcjweden monopolies are countered effectively by consumer co-operative societies without Government regulation ot business. Scattered over every part of Sweden are 39UU extraordinary shops for household sup' plies. Blazoned across the portals of each is the legend, ‘'Konsum.” These konsum shops are maintained by the Consumers’ Co-operative Society, and they are a conspicuous symbol of the growth of Sweden’s co-operative movement. This movement represents a unique- system for keeping, in that country, retail prices at reasonable levels -without Government regulation of business. About lU per cent, of all retail trade in Sweden is cooperatively owned, and about 40 per cent, of the retail trade in groceries, shoes, and clothing is done in these stores owned by cooperative societies to which onethird of the population belongs. Consumers have in several industries built their own factories and taken over the business of producing as well as consuming. The co-operative societies have membersnip organisations open to all. The basic capital ot these societies consists oi membership dues, which amount to about £o per head for life. In 1904 the Co-operative Union, which was formed a few years previously, began to buy and sell at wholesale rates. In 1909 the Union set up a margarine factory whose operations broke the European margarine monopoly. In other words, the consumer began to produce his own goods for his own use, with no official restriction and no over-production. In 1922, bakeries were started, in 1925 the Union opened a shoe factory; in 1927 it challenged the rubber trust and embarked on the manufacture of rubber soles and goloshes—necessities in a northern country of melting snows—and automobile tyres. The Union then proceeded to make its own business machines, and later electric light bulbs. There are many other ramifications of co-operative economics in Sweden. Among them are agricultural and buying and selling societies; 1500 organisations that purchase electric power wholesale and co-operatively distribute it to householders, aud housing cooperatives which shelter 15 per cent, of the citizens of Stockholm.

The rapid expansion of cooperative trading in Sweden was no doubt accelerated by the peculiar conditions applicable to that country, where monopolistic control of essential necessaries of life, often directed from foreign centres, created the need and spirit for public combination to meet oppressive conditions. We in New Zealand find difficulty in realising- tlie problem of a densely populated Europe, with its different nationals living in such close proximity, and with trading, banking, and commerce intermeshed almost to the point of confusion.