First Viennese consumer association
The Erste Wiener Consum-Verein was a civic consumer cooperative in Vienna that existed from 1862 to 1939 .
From its humble beginnings as part of an initiative by senior railway officials, the Erste Wiener Consum-Verein developed into one of the leading retail companies in Vienna in the period before the First World War . One of the first sponsors and also an active president of the association was the director of the Südbahn-Gesellschaft Friedrich Schüler . The cooperative was mainly geared towards the target group of higher-income civil servants and the middle-class upper class, and their sales outlets were accordingly dignified to luxurious. In 1912, on the 50th anniversary, it had about 55,000 members. There was distance for a long time from the established workers 'cooperative ( First Lower Austrian Workers' Consumption Association , founded in 1864 and the Arbeiter-Spar- und Consumverein Fünfhaus , founded in 1865) and even more so from the highly politicized consumer association Vorwärts . The Erste Wiener Consum-Verein attached great importance to strict political Rochdale neutrality and remained with the "General Association" of trade and business cooperatives even after the founding of the consumer association.
In 1905 a tendency to bring about internal reforms emerged. Karl Renner took part in meetings with specific proposals. The First World War, the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the subsequent pauperization of the middle class, namely the civil service, plunged the First Viennese Consum Association into a threatening crisis. In the war and immediately after the war, the number of members rose to over 100,000 (1921–24). But while belonging to the labor movement cooperatives in the consumer association, especially the consumer cooperative Vienna and surrounding wirtschafteten (KGW) then succeeds, the First Viennese Consum-Verein fell twice, first in the mid-1920s and then again in the Great Depression in bankruptcy and had to 1926 and 1935 accept compensation proceedings.
The long-term integration into the KGW, envisaged by the chairman of the consumer association Karl Renner, finally took place in 1939 under the aegis of the Nazi ideology of the " Volksgemeinschaft " in the course of the " Gleichschaltung ". It ended in the Vienna supply ring . After the Second World War, their delivery points of the Consum-Verein were part of the KGW.
literature
- Festschrift: To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the First Viennese Consum Association 1862 - 1912 , Vienna 1912
- Andreas Korp : Stone on stone, 50 years of the wholesale buying company of Austrian consumer associations, a memorial book , Vienna 1955
- Robert Schediwy : The First Viennese Consum Association in: J. Brazda / T. Todev / R. Schediwy: On the history of the bourgeois consumer cooperatives in Austria , Vienna 1996, especially p. 136ff