Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/767

Rh pressing needs; no such justification, however, does the London shopkeeper hold that the people of wealth and title have when they desert his counter for the Civil-Service stores. He regards his profits as inalienable rights, and has at times published plaints on his losses of business in the daily press, at once sordid and silly. The Civil-Service Society has been imitated by several large associations among the army and navy, the clergy and the Nonconformists, who derive many noteworthy advantages from their coöperation. United, and being able to give life and fire insurance companies large lines of business without the usual expense of solicitation, members are enabled to take out policies in companies of standing at a discount. Combination, too, has reduced the charges for legal and medical advice, and whether in making his will, or having a tooth drawn, or having the accouchement of his wife performed, the London coöperator is better off than other men.

Although the stores, as the coöperative warehouses are called, transact but a very small fraction of the retail trade of London, they are finding imitators so fast that an entire change in the methods of doing business is being brought about. The old way of selling goods on credit and charging in prices a percentage large enough to cover the loss and expenses entailed by the system can not stand before the economy of buying and selling for cash. Then the vast scale of the business of the stores enables them to buy on the best terms directly from producers and manufacturers, and the charges of rent, taxes, and management, are proportionately much less than in small independent concerns. The percentage of total expense to business transacted is but 5 on an average for all the British societies, and is perhaps somewhat less in the London stores. Their business is rendered in a large measure uniform by being maintained by a known circle of customers with wants of a fairly calculable character; and large sums are saved by premises not being needed on a street of high rents for chance custom's sake; and the stores do not require to expend, when once-established, anything for advertisements or other solicitation. The chief retail streets of London contain frequent announcements of "Coöperative prices," "Discounts for cash," and "Discounts increasing with the extent of a purchase"—all evidencing attempts to employ the economical features of coöperation by firms competing with the stores.

No coöperator, however sanguine, believes that the stores will eventually supersede all retail shops. Taste and skill will always secure independence, and a better reward than falls to the lot of those who supply in an ordinary unexcellent way the general wants of their customers. An artistic cabinet-maker or upholsterer, as well as a really good tailor or shoemaker, will never need to offer discounts to retain business; but all the many things which one factory can turn out as well as another, or one importer can buy with as much facility as his