A variation from the Rochdale plan is that used in three or perhaps more societies organized in London between 1856 and 1875 by officials and employees of the government. These are the Civil Service Supply Association, the Civil Service Cooeperative Society, and the Army and Navy Stores. In these, instead of buying at wholesale and selling at retail rates, sharing the profits at the end of a given term, they sell as well as buy at wholesale rates, except for the slight increase necessary to pay the expenses of carrying on the store. In other words, the members obtain their goods for use at cheap rates instead of dividing up a business profit. But these and still other variations have had only a slight connection with the working-class cooeperative movement just described. A more direct development of it was the formation, in 1864, of the Wholesale Cooeperative Society, at Manchester, a body holding much the same relation to the cooeperative societies that each of them does to its individual members. The shareholders are the retail cooeperative societies, which supply the capital and control its actions. During its first year the Wholesale Society possessed a capital of L2456 and did a business of L51,858. In 1865 its capital was something over L7000 and business over L120,000. Ten years later, in 1875, its capital was L360,527 and yearly business L2,103,226. In 1889 its sales were L7,028,994. Its purchasing agents have been widely distributed in various parts of the world. In 1873 it purchased and began running a cracker factory, shortly afterward a boot and shoe factory, the next year a soap factory. Subsequently it has taken up a woollen goods factory, cocoa works, and the manufacture of ready-made clothing. It employs something over 5000 persons, has large branches in London, Newcastle, and Leicester, agencies and depots in various countries, and runs six steamships. It possesses also a banking department. Cooeperative stores, belonging to wholesale and retail distributive cooeperative societies, are thus a well-established and steadily, if somewhat slowly, extending element in modern industrial society.