Retailers criticizing Mountain Equipment Co-op

This is an email I sent in response to a Vancouver Sun article [LexisNexis] I saw mentioned in the Wikipedia post on MEC.

Dear Don,

Your Apr 27th article on MEC ("Gear-without-guilt co-op now a Goliath") does a good job of explaining private retailers' complaints concerning MEC, and the article begins in a way that sounds sympathetic to the co-op.

But your article fails to explain what co-operatives are in the first place, why co-ops should have tax-free status, or any other substantive, positive differences that co-operatives have over for-profit companies. Anyone reading your article without prior knowledge of what a co-operative is would come away no wiser at all.

You fail to mention, e.g., that while at MEC's consumer base dictates who runs the company, consumers have no say (save their dollar) in the management of outfits like Trailhead. And you paint the positive work that MEC as 'feel good PR', which would make sense if there were shareholders or owners of MEC making millions of dollars, but that's not the way the incentive structure is organized at MEC, or at any other co-operative for that matter. All these vitally important points are missing in your article, which looks as though it was written at the behest of Vancouver Sun advertisers. If this is so, it is poor journalism indeed.

Finally, who cares if outdoors goods retailers can't hack it? MEC isn't for-profit: if it were the only retailer in town it wouldn't engage in monopolistic pricing because there's no one to reap the fruits of such a pricing policy.

-[me]
(Canada native)

P.S. You also fail to mention that while for-profit retailers have every incentive to be dishonest in their representations of the 'feel-good' things they do, MEC has in fact the opposite incentive. MEC has a better track record than any other retailer in Canada (and probably the world) for ethical sourcing, environmental sustainability, transparency, honesty, employee treatment, the development of extremely high-quality goods, and the encouragement of energy conservation. If this is what it means to become a 'Goliath' then I hope we see many more of them.

P.P.S. I wonder how many private retailers would respond to an email as comprehensively as MEC does in the following interaction.

(perhaps it should have been written in the past tense?)

After seeing an interview with MEC CEO Peter Robinson I was surprised to see that Patagonia and Nike are actually pretty good corporate citizens to which MEC is trying to aspire (in at least some respects).