Consumer cooperative Vienna and the surrounding area

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The consumer cooperative Vienna and Surroundings (KGW), created in 1920, was the largest and most powerful consumer cooperative in Austria for decades .

history

The forerunner of the KGW was the cooperative First Lower Austrian Workers Consumption Association , established in 1864 . This developed over decades in a prosperous and solid structure, but in the first decade of the 20th century got into a sometimes aggressive competition with the more party-politically oriented consumer association Vorwärts . After the First World War it was possible to overcome this competitive phase. On November 1, 1920, the First Lower Austrian Workers' Consumption Association changed its name to Consumers Cooperative Vienna and Surroundings (KGW) and took over the consumer associations Fünfhaus, Donaustadt and Vorwärts. The headquarters of the merged cooperative remained in Wolfganggasse in Vienna- Meidling . The Viennese At that time, KGW was the largest (workers) consumer cooperative in the world with over 100,000 members.

As a result, KGW also managed to cope with the difficult interwar period economically, not least thanks to privileged contacts with the local government, which was politically close until 1934. The merger with founded 1862 civil Konsumgenossenschaft First Vienna Consum Club took place in 1939 as part of the DC circuit by the Nazis.

Even after 1945, the KGW again became a decisive force in the Austrian consumer cooperative system under its managing director Otto Sagmeister . Personal rivalries between Sagmeister and Andreas Korp , the general director of the large purchasing company GöC , as well as factual reasons (e.g. KGW's practically equivalent purchasing power to GöC) led to a tense relationship between KGW and GöC for decades. In the large-scale merger with Konsum Austria in 1978, KGW was materially, if not formally, the determining force (at that time it achieved around 40 percent of all retail sales in Austria), its general director Manfred Kadits became the first general director of Konsum Austria.

literature

  • Johann Brazda , Siegfried Rom (Ed.): 150 years of consumer cooperatives in Austria (series of publications by the research association Development and History of Consumer Cooperatives; Vol. 3). FGK, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-9501499-2-9 .