Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 April 1875 — Are Co-Operative Stores To Be Successful! [ARTICLE]

Are Co-Operative Stores To Be Successful!

Start a co operative afore in any county seat, with an ample capital and good honest business talent to manage it. Buch an establishment would succeed, you say. Yes, if the men who are working it have the nerve to stand up against a peculiar kind of conipetition/tliat will greet them at the outset. This competition is indeed very peculiar, and will try anyone who comes in contact with it. To illustrate—last summer salt was sold in town at a pretty high figure, and one of the Granges concluded to ship in a carload, and did so, getting it considerably below what it had been sold for here, but at a price, perhaps, not quite so low as il was at once offered for by nearly every grocer in the town In fact, salt suddenly became very cheap, although we did not hear that there had been any decline in the prices at the wells. And funny to tell were the numerous^queer yarns that we heard relative to this car-load of salt —how the salt had got wet, had lost its flavor, was dirty, etc. Sowhen a store is started, whatever line of goods is kept in it, we naturally expect to find that other merchants will proceed at once to undersell their former prices, while they point out to the unsophisticated the fact that they are able to sell as cheap as the Grange store, and then they will say there is no need of a Grange store. Of course where these large reductions are made on the opening ot a Grange store we naturally conclude that the former prices were too high, which is probably true. But there is usually a better conclusion to make, and that is that the object is to cause the co-operative stores to fail, by drawing from them the trade of weak-kneed men, and causing them to appear unnecessary and thus to weaken their promoters. The lesson is that a reduction in prices should not be allowed to draw away the legitimate patrons of a co-operative store by observing they will not have a fair showing or must fail. They can succeed, but they must be treated right or they will fail. Stand by them through thick and thin if you start, but if you are not willing to do so, don’t start.— American Patron.