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.

In 1917 a larger group determined to have a bakery which came up to their standards.  In 1919 they had raised enough money to start construction.  Then they faced their first test Their money gave out.  Undaunted they organized a money raising “army,” as they called it, of thirty or forty men.  The money was raised.  By the time the new bakery was opened they had fourteen hundred members and had raised $140,000.  The total organization expenses for three years came to $400, less than three-tenths of one per cent for promotion expenses.

The new business block was opened in May, 1920.  All but the restaurant was under one general manager.  He was bonded for $10,000.  He had had business experience in running a cooperative bank in Wisconsin.  To him was delegated a large degree of freedom, but he was held strictly accountable to the Board of Directors.  A thorough and comprehensive system of bookkeeping and accounting was installed.  Each separate business, the bakeries, the pool room, the meat shop, was put on a cost accounting basis and the manager knew just which one was making or losing money.