I was treasurer (and one of the founders) of a crafts retailing coop
in Woods Hole for 19 years. We had quite a few interesting features.
We had one craftsperson out of 17 who had a product which sold 4x as
well as the next best seller. She made ceramic tiles and many were
the years when everyone else in the store referred to us all as
"tiles R us". Her sales accounted for 50% of the store's annual
gross. We all split all the work evenly, so her big sales often made
a sore point for the others whose sales were half or a quarter
percent of the store's gross.
When I finally was ready to leave the store I was being paid to do
the accounting work because noone else in the store was even slightly
willing to do it. During my years there I worked with 5 different
managers, each of whom quit when she was ready to stop being manager.
When I did the taxes and sent out the K-1 forms, nearly every member
emailed or called me to find out what to do with the form they'd
received. Half of them did not know what a Schedule C was and the
rest gave the forms to their spouses who gave them to the accountant
to do the taxes.
I trained the new treasurer and she's held up pretty well, but I
still do the taxes.
We were rigorously cooperative. Everyone worked the same number of
hours, everyone had the same percentage taken out of the gross sales,
everyone put the same amount of money into the pot at the beginning
of the year. We did not hire anyone - except me to do the taxes and
the woman who painted the store before the beginning of the season
every other year.. All other work was done by the members. We did
not take any work by anyone not a member. We juried every year to
replace departing members. We cleaned, planted, set up the store,
called each other to remind the next person to come in on time,
trained ourselves to operate the swiping machine and write the sales
slips correctly.
Meetings were fragmented, erratic and indecisive. None of the
managers ever knew a thing about Robert's Rules, rarely did we have
an agenda and committees hardly ever made reports. People did not
understand the financial reports and some members simply never came
except to the hours meeting when we signed up for the season's hours
Thank goodness there were only 17 of us!.
We were seasonal from May to December.
I have been a member of some sort of coop my entire life. When I was
a baby and until I went to college my mother shopped in a cooperative
grocery store. In college I lived in a cooperative house, ate in a
food coop that served lunch and dinner 6 days a week. Now I run my
food pre-order coop and I spent 19 years with the store in Woods Hole.
HTH
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxx
508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races, press photography
http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf/
