It's all at the Co-op now

The other day I joined the Co-op.  I shop at a local one every so often and realised that they offer 2p in the £ back, but also 2p in the £ for a local charity.

When I was growing up the Co-op was a central part of my life.   Our day to day shopping was done at the shopping parade with its distinctive clock tower built at 'The Links' at Plumstead Common by the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society (sometimes irreverently known as Rob All Customers Slowly). It's where we did much of our shopping with the Co-op also delivering bread and milk by horse and cart. 

The Co-op issued customers with small paper slips which could be exchanged for tin checks at the check office. When the tin checks were tipped on to the kitchen table, they looked like a treasure trove to a youngster. The checks could be exchanged twice a year for the 'divi', but the sum received always disappointed my parents. 

Bigger purchases meant a trip down to the Royal Arsenal's art deco department store in Powis Street, Woolwich. With its lifts and escalators, and topped by a tower pointing skywards, it looked both huge and sophisticated when I was five or six years old. For some reason, the lifts could only go down to the basement with difficulty. The third floor had a restaurant, bookshop and hairdressers and lifts went 'express' there in the lunch period. 

After many years of going down hill, it closed and was left as a vandalised shell, but has now been converted into apartments. There are some photographs of it in its derelict state here: Abandoned

As the years went by, the Co-op lost its market share. As people became more prosperous, the 'divi' paid to Co-op members lost its attraction, and its goods seemed less sophisticated than those of its emerging competitors. We moved away from what the late Mick Moran called 'a world of deferential citizens and grateful consumers'. The Co-op also suffered from the spread of car ownership: its stores were in traditional shopping parades or, as at Plumstead Common, former suburban parades.

Where the Co-op was very successful (and continues to be) was in providing a funeral service. They provided my grandmother's funeral. I wondered irreverently if that qualified for a dividend.

I always thought that the Cooperative Party was a bit of a rotten borough in the Labour Party because of the way in which John Stonehouse used it as a springboard for his career: -https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/politics/2019/02/28/from-soviet-spy-to-the-disappearing-man-how-ex-mp-john-stonehouse-still-fascinates/

However, one shouldn't generalise from a particular case and like a lot of people I am relatively ignorant about the party and its political role within Labour.