Co-operative Food Glorious Co-operative Food
Monday, 11 April 1984 – Finished project. Went library etc. Went to Newcastle with Ashley to food co-op thing – got back late.
My Keele economics project was a bit of a magnum opus. I set out to try to model the pharmaceutical industry, only to learn very rapidly that the apparent cost drivers (i.e. those that were visible in the public domain) had little to do with the actual costs and where actual economic activity took place – rather they were the product of tax planning devices to ensure that profits were maximised in nations with low rates of corporate taxation. Who knew?
I remember sheepishly asking Joe Nellis (latterly Professor Joe Nellis at Cranfield) early in the process whether I had screwed up by making a naïve choice of question? Joe simply advised me to “tell it how it is” and the dissertation can still do very well. Which it did.
“Went library” will have been part of the convoluted process in those days of ensuring that a project report was typed up and copied appropriately. I think I typed my own but had to pay for copies in the library.
I’ll scan the document and place it in the public domain at some point. If any reader is desperate to see it, pip me an e-mail message requesting that I upload it – that will induce me to do it sooner rather than later.
The evening at the food co-operative with Ashley was an unforgettable experience.
The meeting was in a pub’s snug or upstairs room, I forget which, much like Careless Talk meetings. Indeed many of the participants were from that group and a lot were Keele students, researchers and/or graduates. Bob and Sally were there, although this was not “Bob and Sally’s thing”, not that they considered Careless Talk to be “Bob & Sally’s thing” either. Also , I think, Simon and Theo. In addition, a fairly motley collection of local folk in search of cheap bulk food.
The group had been going for a while, although neither Ashley nor I had visited it before. I am pretty sure this was the one and only visit for both of us.
The group and had named itself “Esamrek”, which was a play on the name of the local wholefood store, Kermase, the idea being that the co-operative would reverse the worst excesses of Kermase (i.e. its desire to make profit from selling food).
I was not at one with this economic position, even back then. I was keen to shine a light on excess profits made by Big Pharma, not least by their trick of playing the global taxation game, but I was not against the idea of a retailer making a turn of profit by retailing food.
The first item for debate at the Esamrek meeting was the name of the group itself, which several members found cumbersome and/or tiresome. The debate on the name was quite lively. I recall Bob (even though it was not Bob and Sally’s thing) trying to steer the discussion towards “groundswells” and “the sense of the meeting” a few times, just as he would at a Careless Talk meeting.
One member, who I can only describe as a left-over hippy type by look and sound, at one point said:
…we should name the group Pan Foods, because Pan is the god of the sun and of the earth.
This statement somewhat silenced the group. I remember thinking that Pan was not exactly the god of those things, but, unsure what he was the god of, and in any case unsure whether that point was relevant to the debate, I decided (wisely I think) not to chime in on this point.
I remember a conversation with Ashley afterwards about this type of factual nit-picking, in which Ashley posited a business idea: a telephone helpline (premium rate naturally), staffed by brainy youngsters armed with encyclopaedias, to which this type of debate might be put and resolved. Ashley’s considered view was that pub debates up and down the country would very naturally resort to such a service and that the business could rake it in. That idea might have done rather well, especially in the early days of the mobile phone, only to do very badly very rapidly once Alta Vista and Google emerged.
Most amusing to me, though, were the debates about what to order and in what quantities. The group was too loosey-goosey libertarian to take firm orders in advance or anything like that, so they were planning based on the sense of the meeting and people’s vague notion of how much of such-and-such a product they might want at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Ashley threw a cat amongst the pigeons a few times by “naively” questioning the exact variant chosen for a particular product. For example, there was a presumption that the order would be for wholegrain rice. Ashley chimed in…
…I don’t really like wholegrain rice so I wouldn’t go for that. I might be interested in white rice…
…at which point several people then admitted that they quite like white rice and hadn’t eaten any of it for a while…not since they started buying infeasibly large quantities of wholegrain rice via the co-operative…
…while others were persistent in their desire for the wholegrain.
A similar debate ensued around brown pasta and so on the meeting went.
My recollection is that the group ended up in a state of some confusion, given that the only way the co-operative could achieve ultra low prices was through buying very large quantities of a very small range of products.
The notion of a supermarket with buying power and the ability to offer a wide range of products all at once, to me, seemed a rational solution to this micro-economic problem. There might have been a whole second economics dissertation in that.
I do recall laughing with Ashley about that meeting afterwards. Rather than a dissertation, Ashley thought there might be a Mike Leigh style play in the story of that evening.
Have you written that play yet, Ashley?