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Co.Op.number.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rod
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I recall my mom’s co-op number was 345608, nice and easy to remember.



I also remember her going to the fifth floor of the co-op in town to get her divi; seeing the thousands of divi books all stored on shelves.



Now a question that has been perplexing me for a while; how was the divi calculated?



What has got me thinking is; the milkman, the baker and laundry man delivered stuff to the house. You paid and gave your co-op number, he wrote the number and the amount in a duplicate book, and tore of a little receiptabout 1” x 2”.



Same thing each time you went shopping. You paid and gave your co-op number, the shop staff wrote the number and the amount in a duplicate book,and tore of a little receipt.



You therefore had hundreds of receipt books, all with various amounts of divi, owed to thousands of people, all in random order; how did they pull all this information together into an indervidual divi?



It would be quite straight forward to crunch this up with a computer now, and looking at the photograph of the girls working on the divi, they did have comptometers, but it must have been a massive task.



Any suggestions?
 
Moms was 21177, but have no idea what my own was, so mom benfits from mine lol!!
My Uncle Albert ran the Co-op greengrocers on the Cov for many years and he always used to remind customers to collect their divi for Xmas. He and my Aunt Win lived over the co-op in Church Road, Sheldon.
Sue
 
I worked at the coop dry cleaners in birmingham city centre and when the books were full we had to send them to the office for them to work out who was entitled to what it must have been a real headache
 
We didn't have a Co-op number when I was a child because my step mother had a dislike of the Co-op, but we did have a customer number at Baines the bakers. So when I fetched the bread, I had to remember the number which was 65867, otherwise I would have been in trouble. However, I did join the Co-op when I got married and they used to give us this stickly little label which you attached to a booklet and when it was full the divi was added up and spent in the shop. Does anyone else remember that?
 
Hi All!
Morturn: The Co-op used to have "unit-record equipment", i.e. punched-card sorters and tabulators. These were made by Powers-Samas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers-Samas and were similar to Holleriths. Whereas normal cards (often called IBM cards from the time of the first automated US census around 1890-something) had eighty columns, the Co-op's had only 21, enough for share number and amount. In 1965, when I started work at head office in High St, 140 ladies were punching 250,000 transactions a DAY. So that's how your divi was processed. However, Powers-Samas had announced that the kit would not be supported much longer owing to lack of spares. So an ICT (later ICL) 1902 mainframe (16K - yes K - of RAM) was ordered and we set about programming it to replace the old stuff. A change was made to punched-tape using punches made by Creed. Again it was none standard, having 5 rows of holes across rather than 8. After I had left (to go to Electrolux) they decided to go over to divi stamps (no membership needed and no calculations), so all that effort and (considerable) expense went to waste. What a shame!
The real irony was that stamps were used already in the filling stations, so the writing was on the wall if anyone chose to read it.

Hope that's of interest.

Stan
 
Yes Mom's was 279295 I have never forgotton it I used to keep the little tickets off the Co op milkman when he came around with his horse also the baker.Lived in Arkley Rd Hall Green I would have been about 7 or 8
 
211726 a number I will never forget paid the George the milkman most weeks for my Mom in Tower Road ASTON when he came on his rounds parked his horse out side Mrs Rudge's outdoor, after he fitted the nose bag to keep the horse quiet. funny how some number stick,never can remember telephone numbers lol :0)
 
When we moved to Clifford St Lozell,s we had milk and bread off the co op. Someone scratched our mom,s number on a brick on the side of the door in case we forgot it it was 235343 an easy one to remember. Coincidently my late brothers army no was 235342.
 
TOPSYTURVEY said:
Someone scratched our mom,s number on a brick on the side of the door in case we forgot it it was 235343 .
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I think my mom scratched hers on my brain because I always remember it 60 years later. 200904
Strange thing is these days when I want something from upstairs I reach the landing and can't think what I've come up for !
 
Re: Co-OP

Hi There,

Reading this thread brings back some wonderful memories, shopping down Ladypool Road with my dear departed Mom,morris's the butchers, Wollys, and of course the Coop. I am 58 years old now but i still rember my moms membership number 122426 and my Aunt Polly's 261580

Bill
 
258431 never to be forgotten or my Mother didn't get her divi. Remember the COOP on the Walsall road always smelt of cheese and raw bacon also intrigued by the overhead system of moving the cash to the cash office.
 
remember the little pink ticket with the membership number and the amount spent my moms purse was full of them.
they must have gone back to the Co-op officies to be collated by hand i would think, a bit diffrent to the Tesco clubcard, no computers in them days
 
I was reading this thread the other day before going out shopping, then I put my card in the machine to pay and could only think of Mum's Co-op number.

Nan used to get upset if I used Mum's number instead of hers!!
 
A booklet for prospective Co-op members. The Rochdale Pioneers are mentioned as "far-seeing men and women". Viv.

image.jpeg image.jpeg image.jpeg
 
They did Vivienne. You can appreciate how much extra business was done when it was double or treble stamp week. In the non-food section to save sticking in a multitude of stamps when buying high value goods a voucher equal to a book full was issued.
 
Vivienne14 said:
These must have replaced the dividend - a 1970s stamp saver book. Viv.
View attachment 119321
Click to expand...

Now there a memory mnemonic. I remember my mom being quite upset when they got rid of the co-op divie.

As a matter of interest, would anyone know how each persons dividend was calculated and compiled?

All those co-op numbers, and those little tickets that were issued, how on earth was this all pulled together. Easy today with computers, but it must have taken an army of people with pencils and paper then
 
Not sure this adds much to our understanding of exactly how the divi was computated Mort, but this Yardley shop had a dividend payment day when customers collected their divi from the shop. Maybe indivdual shops calculated and paid the divi for their customers. But that doesn't explain bread, milk and coal deliveries to individual houses, unless they were linked to a specific shop. Viv.

image.jpeg
 
I remember going with my Mom into the Co-op in town to get her book "made up" so she knew how much divvy she had. I assume someone had to add the records from the carbon copies of those little slips to some sort of file for each number. A mammoth paper task.
 
Oh yes, I'd forgotten about the little slips of paper given to the customer. So Janice, were these slips of paper a copy of what the shop/baker/milkman recorded in his book ? It never registered with me what the slips of paper were for ! Viv.
 
Vivienne14 said:
Oh yes, I'd forgotten about the little slips of paper given to the customer. So Janice, were these slips of paper a copy of what the shop/baker/milkman recorded in his book ? It never registered with me what the slips of paper were for ! Viv.
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As far as I can remember the slip contained your number and the amount spent. You got the top copy and the carbon copy stayed in the book. I assume the milkman, grocer or whatever then sent it off (or handed it in) for entering into each person's account.
 
Yes and thanks, I now remember my mom collecting here divi from the co=op in town. I think it was on the top floor. On one occasion I was in the co-op maybe the top floor and there were thousands of small books on steel shelving. I have a feeling that there were the divi books.
 
Just thinking about this again, did the co-op ever have stamps as a form of currency, or was this a 'provident' (?) scheme?

I remember she had a book of stamps (not postage), and use these for payment for some clothes she bought us. The cashier would take payment in these stamps.
 
As a youngster I was sometimes left to pay the Co-Op milkman and when he asked for the dividend number I had to say
twodoubleonineofour
:)
 
More on the 'Divi' (image below from Grace's Guide). By 1949 you could collect divi on purchases made around the country and you could transfer your account to another area. So, as Morturn said originally, a massive, manual computation exercise. Viv.
 

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Thanks Viv. I did suspect this, and its maybe why they dispensed with the Divi as it was costing a fortune to process.

I am interested in this, as we tend to see the face of the co-op in the historical photos of the shops fronts etc as the history of the company. But there must have been a whole army of people in the back offices who made a significant contribution to the success of the business.

It's their stories that have disappeared into history and become lost in the past. What were their working conditions like, what did they do and how did they do it. What skills did they have that may now be lost....
 
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