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    Re: The CoOp is virtually no more Archived Message

    Posted by scrabb on October 19, 2020, 6:38 pm, in reply to "Re: The CoOp is virtually no more"

    The Co-Op (correct spelling) is a sore topic with me. It was a started in 1844 in my home town of Rochdale. We all had Co-Op accounts and collected our "divvy" twice a year. When the new supermarkets started up in the 60s/70s the Co-Op had a golden opportunity to be one of the leading players. They had prime retail sites on practically every high street in the country, whereas the Tescos and Asdas had to build from scratch. Unfortunately the Co-Op was still run as a Victorian business and the directors and managers were hopelessly out-of-touch with modern marketing and advertising practices. They even had a built-in advantage in that they manufactured most of their own products with factories producing tea, tobacco, shoes, clothing, furniture, practically everything you could name.

    All this was thrown away by poor management and being years behind the times. A few years ago I switched banking to the Co-Op because it was selling itself as the "ethical" bank that wouldn't invest in armaments and dubious regimes and instead invested in green technologies. About a year after I joined it was riven with financial scandals (again crap leadership was to blame) and it nearly collapsed -- only to be rescued by American hedge fund managers.

    I'm still angry whenever I think of what the Co-Op could have been, yet was led by incompetent, complacent clowns who wouldn't change because that's how they had always done things. Tragic really.

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