Page 30 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

The Story of the C.W.S.
which reported at Manchester upon estabUshing " wholesale central
depots." The committee suggested three courses. The first and
most complete method was that of the societies in each district
federating to create a wholesale house. Such an institution would
have been a C.W.S. in a less degree. The second proposal, " not so
complete " but " more practicable," meant that " the largest store
in a given locality should be adopted as a centre." The third plan,
" outlined two years since at a district conference held at Bradford,"
was for societies jointly to employ a chosen buyer who, working
from a central office, would act as agent for all.
The last was the method which the committee recommended
most strongly. Curiously, the C.W.S. , which now embodies the
most ambitious of these plans on a national scale, itself began in this
cheap and cautious style of an agency. Nevertheless, the history
of wholesale co-operation for the next few years represents the
working out of the second recommendation, in favour of leading
stores creating wholesale departments.
In 1855 the dozen delegates who at that time quite sufficed for
a co-operative conference met at Rochdale. The Society for
Promoting Working Men's Associations had been unable to organise
that year's annual gathering, and the Pioneers had stepped into the
breach. The conference agreed that "it is the duty of the various
co-operative stores to deal with some co-operative centre, and that
Rochdale be recommended as the centre for the surrounding neigh-
bourhood." After a further conference of societies in the locality
in 1856, the Rochdale Pioneers consented to commence a wholesale
department. Accordingly they formed a separate wholesale
committee, and set aside capital for the new venture. But a series
of losses, amounting in all to £1,500, obliterated the profits, and
after three years the department was closed. Abraham Greenwood,
the chairman of the Pioneers' Wholesale Committee, has said that
the enterprise was killed by the jealousy of societies leading to
disloyalty. Accepting the human nature we have to work with, it
is easy to see how complications might have arisen. Other towns
possessed societies which were on their way to becoming equal in
power with the Pioneers. At a slightly later date some of them,
as we shall see, entertained tlie idea of wholesale trading. Now,
competition between co-operative societies usually develops by
force of circumstances rather than of intent, hence it is the more clear
that general w holesale trading by retail societies, if it had flourished
at Rochdale, might have spelled disaster in success. Either there
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