"The women did not figure that in the average retail store delivery adds eight per cent. to the cost of goods. Then the wives of the subscribers seemed to think that they should get goods at cost, because their husbands held stock. The manager of the store, an experienced buyer, saved them from fifty to seventy-five cents on a five-dollar order. The profits of the store were to go back to the stockholders in the form of dividends. The women, and some of the men, could not grasp the idea of future saving, of dividend paying. They felt that they were saving very little by paying cash; they were annoyed by having to make out orders for large quantities, when they had been accustomed to send round to the corner grocery three or four times a day. And so the association died.
"When you figure that those allied roads employ sixty thousand men, each of whom would spend a minimum of four hundred dollars a year in a cooperative store, you find that such an association would do a business of twenty-four million ($24,000,000) dollars a year. At least three per cent. would go back to the men
