Word: coops
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That the amateurs on the board of directors are elected by Coop members is no consolation if the Coop's business policies do not make us better-off. (The policies are certainly making student directors better off, since they get to add juicy lines to their resumes.) And a mismanaged Coop with high prices--even with the rebate--certainly does not serve its members...
There's really nothing the Coop provides for its members that cannot be found elsewhere in the Square. One exception might be textbooks, but if there were no Coop, other stores in the Square would probably pick up the slack. If they didn't, Harvard would have to. And even that couldn't be as bad as searching for texts at the Coop every semester...
Maybe the economy will pick up soon and the Coop's rising rent and health care costs will come down...
...even so, there's no guarantee that the neophytes on the Coop's board of directors are capable of making the savvy decisions that would restore the Coop's competitiveness in an increasingly competitive Harvard Square. Such bold decision-making is the only way the Coop rebate will once again rise to 10 percent--where it hovered for much of the past 30 years before starting its free-fall in 1988, when both the economy began to sour and competition in the Square began to intensify...
Consumer cooperatives are not fundamentally evil, but they don't always work either. Coop members just may be better off if the Coop were to "decooperatizing" and restructure itself as an investor controlled company. The prospect of better service and competitive prices at a "non-co-op" Coop would be far more rewarding to consumers than the privilege of voting for incompetent boards of directors and collecting insignificant rebate checks...