We were a little surprised by the recent Sunday Valley News summary of the Hanover Co-op’s 2019 financial results. Despite the breadth of information and conversations shared with your team in recent years, you’ve assessed our cooperative results through a corporate lens that looks at profit and cash payout only.
It is an old mistake to assess cooperatives using only standard metrics punctuated by dollar signs. Our cooperative has frequently sent you details of triple-bottom-line businesses like ours. For at least a decade, journalists such as those at Forbes have been reporting on the three pillars for properly measuring businesses in the 2000s. (See “The Bottom Line of Corporate Good” on Forbes.com.) Yet John Lippman’s March 8 column, “Hanover Co-op’s operating loss means no refund check for customers,” automatically concludes that record sales without a refund is failure.
As an independent grocer holding its own against industry titans, we measure and fulfill our mission through continual investments in our employees and their communities, environmental stewardship and, yes, sound financial outcomes.
The comment about “skimpy” patronage refunds looks at just payout. While the column mentioned our 7.6 percent increase in wages and benefits, please remember that $1.2 million includes health care increases and a bump in wages for people working throughout our operating units. Some might suggest it’s $1.2 million that should have gone to the bottom line, but we saw it otherwise.
We monitor facilities expenses carefully. We’ve shared how the costs associated with the recent move of our offices saves more than $340,000 over five years. Other facility investments reduce environmental impact, earning our Co-op top-in-the nation EPA awards.
Bigger profits could be extracted from the pockets of local farms and suppliers, but squeezing area businesses is a corporate tactic we refuse to use. Our donations of time, money and resources to Upper Valley organizations may lower the chance for a patronage refund, yet produce stronger communities.
This is just a sampling the Hanover Co-op’s 2019 results as seen through the lens of people, the planet and our members’ business. It’s a triple bottom line that is anything but skimpy.
ED FOX and PAUL GUIDONE
Hanover
The writers are general manager and interim general manager, respectively, of the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society.
The Valley News recently published a VtDigger report on the Vermont Legislature pushing to establish a legal market for marijuana, supposedly to provide a way to safely purchase this drug (“House advances pot tax measure: Bill would set regulations for legal retail market,” Feb. 27). It also noted a proposal to set aside 30% of any excise tax revenue to go to a statewide drug prevention fund. Current state law mandates any sales taxes received would go to the education fund.
I keep wondering if I’m the only person who sees the hypocrisy in all this.
First off, when the marijuana law was proposed, it was to allow individuals to use marijuana in their own homes, and to grow a few plants for that purpose, without legal ramifications. They now have that right. So if these users are growing their own product, why is there a need to purchase it?
Second, and most important, how do our legislators and educators justify promoting drug use on the one hand and on the other claim to be educating against it? I also wonder if the state’s promotional information is honest about how it gets part of its education funding from drug money.
STEPHEN RAYMOND
Sharon
To honor the president, may I humbly suggest we begin referring to the new coronavirus as the Trump Flu? After all, he is the one man who has bravely contradicted the experts’ alarmist rhetoric, assuring us that we have pandemics from time to time, this one is likely to fade away once the weather gets warm, and the Chinese have done a great job containing the virus.
Also, his natural scientific genius allowed us to save money by firing the National Security Council’s pandemic director in 2018 and ordering the delay in testing that undoubtedly would have caused panic if the public had learned prematurely how quickly the Trump Flu was spreading.
Finally, his already well-established business genius is quickly righting the economy by taking action to criticize the Europeans and the Federal Reserve chairman while advocating for legislation to bail out his hotel empire.
It is well known that flattery is valued higher than even competence by this president, and I can think of no flattery more appropriate than naming this virus after President Trump.
DAVID ALLEN
White River Junction