Word: cooped
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Coop's early success--and to today's success as well, say current members of the Board of Directors--is simply good business management. To curb a spendthrift Harvard community, the original student founders mandated in the constitution that payment for goods be in cash only. The cash-only requirement has since changed--as any undergraduate carrying that all-important red plastic well knows--but the same keen business sense still permeates the operation...
Perhaps inevitably, student participation in running the operation declined markedly as the Coop grew and the whole approach became decidedly more businesslike. Professional managers were increasingly brought in, efficient and tight accounting procedures were developed, the stores were opened to non-members, bigger loans were taken out. And all along, sales and membership went...
Today the Coop is every bit the modern department store, paralleling Jordan Marsh and Filenes. While the 23-member Board of Directors is made up of Harvard and MIT faculty and students and 10 "stockholders" officially own all the members' shares in trust, most of the power in the Coop is wielded by General Manager James A. Argeros, who manages the day-to-day operations. Argeros came to the Coop five years ago from the Allied Stores Corporation and is perceived by his colleagues as a tough, shrewd businessman. Under his direction in recent years. Coop membership has climbed above...
...Coop management is proud of its track record--and makes no bones about it. "They [the stores] feel they are serving the students," says vice president Donald P. Severance, who is also a development officer at MIT. Chimes in Argeros, "Over the long haul, a person shopping at the Coop gets quality, value--and a rebate." This is Argeros' chief selling point, and he invariably returns to it in discussion. "The biggest beneficiary of the Coop's progress are the members," he says, pointing out that increased profits mean bigger rebates for Coop members...
Actually, not all the profits go back to Coop members. Roughly 40 percent of Coop business comes from non-members, and so about 40 percent of the profits gets ploughed back into the cooperative. And even with the rebate, recent years have seen growing dissatisfaction with the direction the Coop has chosen. Many students complain that the Coop overprices in some areas, making the rebate offer meaningless. Argeros maintains that the Coop offers good value in comparison to similar stores. In addition, a number of students believe that, as Guy Molyneux '81-4 puts it, "[The Coop] has very little...