Word: cooped
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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...
...there is one subject that has traditionally ranked Coop officials, it is the controversial effort by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1445 to bring a union into the cooperative. That effort has apparently been side-tracked for the time being. But although the UFCW has announced that it is withdrawing its petition for a scheduled union election, the whole affair has left a legacy of bitterness and animosity between store management and union organizers...