Co-operation · Ch 10 — Consumers Co-operative Society
Meaning and Definition of a Consumers Co-operative Society
Meaning and Definition of a Consumers Co-operative Society
Think of the long journey an ordinary packet of sugar or a bar of soap makes before it reaches a household. The manufacturer sells it to a wholesaler, the wholesaler sells it to a distributor, the distributor sells it to a retailer, and only then does the consumer buy it. At every stage a middleman adds his profit, and sometimes his tricks — short weight, adulteration, hoarding to push up the price. The person who pays for all of this, and who is least able to fight back, is the ordinary consumer. The consumers co-operative society was created as the consumer's own answer to this problem.
A consumers co-operative society is a voluntary association of ordinary consumers who join together to buy goods of daily use directly from producers or wholesalers, and then sell those goods to their own members (and often to the public) at fair and reasonable prices. By purchasing in bulk and cutting out the chain of profit-taking middlemen, the society is able to supply pure, good-quality goods at prices lower than those of the ordinary market. Its guiding idea is self-help through mutual help — the consumers themselves become the owners of the shop that serves them.
The Core Idea in One Line
A consumers co-operative society is a shop owned by the very people who buy from it, set up to supply honest goods at fair prices by eliminating the middleman and sharing the saving among its members.
Because it is a co-operative, it is registered under the co-operative societies law of the state (in Maharashtra, the Maharashtra Co-operative Societies Act, 1960), it enjoys a separate legal existence apart from its members, and it works on the settled principles of co-operation — open membership, democratic 'one member, one vote' control, and service before profit. In the Maharashtra Std XI Co-operation syllabus, the consumers co-operative society is studied as the type of co-operative that works at the last, retail end of trade, where the co-operative movement first began (the Rochdale Pioneers of 1844 ran the world's first successful consumers' store) and where it touches the daily life of the common person most directly.
A voluntary association of consumers, registered under the co-operative law, that buys goods of daily use in bulk directly from producers or wholesalers and supplies them to its members at fair and reasonable prices by eliminating middlemen.
A trader (wholesaler, distributor or retailer) who stands between the producer and the consumer and adds his own profit at each stage; a consumers co-operative society exists mainly to eliminate the unnecessary middleman.