Word: cooped
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...example cited by proponents of this view is the uproar over the unionization drive going on now (see accompanying story). Another was the expansion of the Coop into downtown Boston two years ago, which some criticized as having nothing to do with students' needs. Coop officials then defended the move by pointing out that the new store was in the same building housing the downtown Boston Harvard Club and thus served an important Coop constituency, alumni. And recently, several officials said that sales there have helped balance less profitable parts of the Coop operation like textbooks--and thus--you guessed...
Textbook prices, in fact, are one of the thornier issues facing the Coop and perhaps the best example of the philosophical debate over the Coop's direction. Textbooks, almost everyone who knows about the Coop agrees, are simply not profitable for the store. With an extensive search service, liberal return policy, and relatively low mark-up, the Coop annually faces a break-even prospect at best in the field. Yet at the same time, students are looking themselves at an increasingly tight financial squeeze, and overall textbook prices are not insignificant, running most Harvard students upwards of $300 a year...
...senior member of the Board of Directors termed such a proposal "nonsense." Under the law, the Coop, as a cooperative society, pays no taxes on the profits it distributes back to members, only on the profits it makes from non-members, Thus, he said, if the Coop cuts the rebate down, a chunk of the money made would have to go to the government. And, he notes, that would mean Coop members would be sharing profits with non-members--something "antithetical to the whole cooperative effort...
Plainly, it is going to be difficult for Coop members like Molyneux to accomplish some of the changes they would like to see in the cooperative. But that doesn't mean they're not trying. In recent elections a group of students have formed a slate of candidates to run for the Board of Directors on a reform platform. Several members of the "Coop Group," as they call themselves, won spots on the Board in the past two years. These reformers have a long way to go--but at least it's a start...
...their quest for change, the Coop Group and other reformers are going against 100 years of Coop tradition in a management that clearly believes in the correctness of their policy. One senior official, who wished to remain unidentified, states with conviction. "The only way we can try to serve the members is to maximize profits....The Coop just wouldn't operate effectively if it were a social club--it doesn't work that way." That's a lot of tradition to change...