The results of these changes were soon apparent. For the first time the dead line between losses and earnings was crossed and net earnings gradually began to mount. In September, 1921, the amount of business wavered around a hundred dollars a week. In March, 1922, it averaged about $330 per week, and net earnings have run as high as $75 per week.
The laundry is still small and is located in quarters for which it pays a regular commercial rent. It has expanded several times and now has three power washers, an ironer or mangle, a dry room and other equipment. It employs a business manager, who supervises the plant and does everything from keeping the books to collecting the laundry in a pinch, a work manager, a washer, a sorter and marker, four ironers and a delivery boy. It still holds hard to the policy of putting out the very best kind of work and economizing in every particular.
Its very success has in a way embarrassed the laundry. The manager has been offered special inducements to leave. The delivery system has been tampered with. There has even been acid thrown on the clothes by outsiders jealous of its business. But this has only stimulated the whole membership to fight harder to realize their aim of getting their own laundry work done the way they want it, and without profit.
The Finnish Cooperative Societies of Brooklyn.
What is it that makes the Finns so successful at Cooperation? Industry and cleanliness. At any rate those are the striking characteristics of the Finns of Brooklyn.
Up to the present time they have never paid any dividends. It has been explained to them, as their manager says, that if the business is to serve them properly it must grow, and in order to grow it needs all the surplus earnings for expansion. And so, because the members are industrious and far-sighted, they have foregone their dividends. The cleanliness of their stores, too, is an inspiration not only to their membership but to hundreds of others who have visited their plant. This is one of the biggest business assets they possess.
These virtues have enabled the Finnish group in Brooklyn to build cooperatively a three-story modern business block, to run therein a wholesale bakery, a retail bakery, a meat shop and grocery store, a cooperative restaurant and a cooperative pool room, to build adjacent to this two modern cooperative apartment houses and to lay the foundations for a third now under construction. Outside of the housing venture the business done last year was $175,000 and today there are nearly two thousand members.
Although these undertakings are practically a part of the same group there are three separate corporations. The largest of these is the Finnish Cooperative Trading Association, Inc. The restaurant is operated as the Workers' Cooperative Restaurant, Inc., and the housing association as the Finnish Homebuilders' Association, Inc.
The restaurant is the oldest. Seven years ago a group of Finns in this locality boarded together. Their capital was a hundred dollars which some one had loaned to them. They ran their little business on a cooperative basis, paying for the meals and putting back any surplus into a reserve. No one contributed anything, but before long they paid back the one hundred dollars. Early in 1922 they incorporated. They then owned a fine modern restaurant, had done $70,000 worth of business in 1921, and had three thousand dollars in the bank. And no one had ever paid a cent into the business. With all this they sell their food at unusually low prices, well cooked, wholesome, and clean.