Midland Cooperator

Co-ops and Middlemen

St. Paul, Minn.

TO THE EDITOR:

Opponents of the Cooperative movement often accuse cooperators of elimineting the middlemen, thereby causing unemployment and contributing to the breakdown of the American system of free enterprise.

The fact must be remembered that all commodities must be handled, transported and stored as they move from farm or factory to the ultimate consumer. Approximately the same amount of human effort is required to effect this movement whether the goods are moving through cooperative, mail order, chain store channels or through the hands of individual jobbers, wholesalers and retailers.

Somebody is going to employ men and women to furnish this effort. The only people that have been eliminated along the way so far are the profit-takers, and they have been largely replaced by salaried people.

If the savings made through the process of distribution are plowed back into the business, and cooperatives must put part of their savings back into their businesses to continue expansion, those savings will furnish employment.

If the savings are passed on to the consumer, the consumer can and will use them to buy more goods, thereby creating jobs for more men and women.

Certainly the cooperative movement must have for one of its aims the improvement of the distribution process and the using of the resultant savings to put more people to work producing.

-L. B. RITTER