The Farmers' Own Store: Stanwood's Answer to the Butcher's Price
A correspondent from Florence reports that cooperative Rochdale stores are spreading down the West Coast — Stanwood's has been open six months, and its shareholders have just voted to add a butcher shop rather than keep selling cattle at a loss.
(D. A. Peckinpah, Florence.)
I have read a good many good articles in The Ranch, but have not seen a word about the new movement that is starting and taking a firm hold of the west coast — the Rochdale stores that are starting all over the country, with a wholesale store in San Francisco. The intention is to have them owned and controlled by the people, to keep a good stock of goods at reasonable prices and be strictly one-price stores. There is one at Stanwood station. It has been in operation six months and has done a good business. At the last stockholders' meeting they voted to start a butcher shop, so as to have a place to dispose of their beef cattle, hogs and sheep at a reasonable price. Heretofore the butchers would not pay a price that would equal the cost of growing the cattle, so the stockholders of the People's Union store saw that to live they would have to do something to help themselves. They voted almost unanimously to start a butcher business connected with and under the same management as the store. The superintendent, Mr. Moore, of the wholesale store in San Francisco, intends to visit our section of the country soon. While he is here anyone can get all the information they will want. There is also a gentleman sent up here by the main store to go through the state and hold meetings in different localities to assist them in starting Rochdale retail stores, each store to have a general stock of goods that will suit the locality in which they are started. There are sixty in California, a number in Oregon and eighteen or more in Washington.
“The stockholders of the People's Union store saw that to live they would have to do something to help themselves.”
Long before Seattle's food co-ops and buying clubs, Washington farmers were pooling their own capital to own the store, the stock and the slaughterhouse rather than sell into a buyer's market. The complaint Peckinpah records — that the middleman's price never covers the cost of raising the animal — is the same squeeze that drives direct-to-consumer farm sales and co-op grocery chains today. The Rochdale model, born in England in 1844, had reached Puget Sound within sixty years.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.