The theory of Associations of Consumers is simple in the extreme. It consists in the elimination and reduction of intermediate profits, and the purchase by the retail customer of goods as nearly as possible at prime cost. The method employed is to sell at the usual market price and to return the surplus in the form of a percentage upon the total of purchases—which percentage is usually called a dividend. The fund from which such payments are paid is “the fund commonly known as profit,” and commonly retained under that name by the individual employer. Some writers have pointed out that this fund is in truth not profit but only savings. “‘Wealth is not created, it is only economised by distribution’; but in co-operative distribution it is economised to such effect that, for the workers at any rate, it has appeared to create wealth where none existed nor could exist for them under the old system of competitive trading.”[70] The “fund commonly called profit” is in fact “the margin between the prime cost of an article and the price paid for it over the counter by the individual customer.” The appropriation of this margin, or of a considerable part of it, to the customer is a feature not only of stores belonging to working class members but also of such undertakings as the Civil Service or the Army and Navy Stores. In these instances, however, the method adopted is to diminish the selling price; and this slight difference of procedure has led to a wide difference of results. The ordinary customer of the middle class stores feels himself, for the most part, but a purchaser at an exceptionally good and cheap shop; the customer at a store that follows the plan of the original Rochdale Pioneers feels himself the member of a community and the inheritor of a tradition. The fund, being collected in the hands of the society at large, is recognised more clearly as the property of all members alike; its destination is regulated by the governing body whom those members elect; and it forms a continual object lesson in political economy. In these cases, it is clear to all persons who understand the processes, that competition has been checked. The margin no longer goes into an employer’s pocket but returns to the customer; and since the working classes are the largest customers, most of it returns to them. In nearly all instances, however, a part of the fund is retained for public uses; few, indeed, are the societies that contribute nothing towards educational or federal purposes.