ABSTRACT
The British Consumers’ Co-operative movement, with its ten million shareholding members and its far-flung organisation of local stores all over the country, is immensely bigger than any single capitalist enterprise, and ramifies, through its productive departments, into a wide range of industries. The largest, the London Co-operative Society, which covers only a part of the London area north of the Thames, has recently reached a million members; at the other extreme are village societies with only a few score and with but a single shop, dealing mainly in groceries. Arrayed against the Co-operatives are the various private retail trading agencies—from large ‘chains’ of stores and big private department stores to the vast number of small shops, general or specialised, in both towns and villages. Mutual trading has been held out as at one and the same time morally superior to profit-making and more advantageous to the consumer from the economic standpoint.
