Membership Scheme for Community Shops
In June this year, the Plunkett Foundation organised a national networking event for community owned shops at which 25 community shop representatives were present. A motion was put forward for a national membership scheme to be created - with Community Shops in the driving seat and Plunkett administering the scheme.
The rational for membership is to provide community shop members with a greater voice, strategic input into the services that Plunkett offers, and greater purchasing power with suppliers of services, products and equipment. With the 250th community owned shop due to open later this Autumn, there has never been a more relevant time for a national membership scheme to be created, and especially in this economic climate.
To get a membership scheme off the ground which offers relevant incentives and is accessible to all community shops, a steering group has come together consisting of six community shops and two representatives from the Plunkett Foundation. A postcard will shortly be sent to all community shops to ask you what is important to your community shop: What support does your shop require to reduce costs, grow sales, increase profitability – how can Plunkett help in this endeavour, and what specifically could a membership scheme offer you? Please complete and return these postcards to us to ensure your views are heard, and please reply to this forum topic to share your views on the Forum with other community shops.
Remember, your opinion is important as membership can maximise all our synergies to ensure that we can on your behalf;
- promote community owned shops to funders and policy makers
- reduce running costs of community shops
- share best practice and performance data within the sector
- gain access to information and support
We look forward to hearing your views...
The Community Shops Network is a great resource in terms of sharing best practice in particular but would benefit greatly if more shops were involved in contributing.
Presumably a membership scheme would be more formal and more dynamic in terms of generating support and promoting the concept of community shops.
We received your "postcard" but I'm not quite sure what to do with it so I thought I could reply via the network. It would be extremely helpful to us if the Plunkett Foundation could help us in areas such as the following:
I hope these thoughts help.
Arthur Grosset
Monks Eleigh Community Shop
Thank you Arthur,
These thoughts most certainly help and will provide us with a lot of ideas to get started with. I particularly like your suggestion about auditors and book keepers - this is an enquiry we are seeing more of currently as shops prefer in some cases to seek external opinion and advice on financial matters.
Also interesting about insurance - specifically regarding volunteers.
Many thanks again for your thoughts and suggestions.
James Alcock (Plunkett Foundation)
Great post Arthur.
For me this covers most of the key bits and pieces. I guess implicit amongst some of these items is the notion of a representational role, i.e. lobbying government and presenting the case for community owned services such as shops, pubs, post offices.
There was also a discussion here on EPOS systems, and still think there may be potential for something here, especially for cooperative shops that might be interested in offering a member dividend based on trade.
What about collective utility purchasing? Energy costs are set to soar over the next few years, and once you've got a few chillers humming away the bills can quickly stack up.
I'm sure there are lots of other useful aggregation-based services that could be developed. Possibilities also for some sort of common branding that could potentially contribute to savings, or would that act against the whole strength of the local?
A small point about audit costs - I'm guessing that most shops will be operating under the threshold that demands an audit?
All the best
Graham
www.slaithwaite.coop
I note from a current discussion ongoing on the US based Cooperative Grocers Information Network (www.cgin.coop) that the National Cooperative Grocers Association is looking at the development of a payroll service for its members.
Would this be something of interest to would-be members of the Community Shops Network here in the UK? I know that we have been paying a third party to do this for us, although I think we will be bringing it in-house shortly.
I'm with Arthur in all the suggestions that he raised.
"Might is right" is unfortunately the rule when it comes to our buying power and influence with all suppliers (who have their own mortgages to worry about). We now have a Tesco, JS, Iceland and Lidl kicking each other in the teeth within 3 miles of our shop. Three of those have opened in the last year. Inevitably we are having to fight harder and harder to keep customers when they are seeing silly offers designed to seduce them into a life of multiple sin.
Anything Plunkett can do to get us better deals on supplies and save money on overheads like power, insurance etc has to be a help.
Dudley George Chairman Coaley Community Shop
Re: Membership Scheme for Community Shops.
Like most things it will come down to a cost & benefit analysis.
I worked 35 years in f.m.c.g. Sales & Marketing so have experience of buying groups such as Spar,Mace. I even attended an initial meeting of the setting up of NISA, which was then Northern Independent Supermarkets Association later to become NISA/Todays and very successful. Costcutter was also formed and again is very successful.
The key to getting discounts/rebates is being able to deliver discipline to the providers in that what is agreed is supported by all members.
Wholesalers want volume, manufacturers want distribution and market share which leads to volume. We could/should be having discussions with Spar,NISA,Booker and P & H as a start.
Albert Sheffield