Is this the article?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Emily L. Ferguson" <elf@xxxxxxxx>
To: "List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students"
<photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, August 26, 2005 12:33 PM
Subject: Re: Asking for help - again
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/
