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blog名称:sangsang1987 日志总数:68 评论数量:28 留言数量:0 访问次数:315767 建立时间:2008年11月7日 广告位招租 |
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 Living Your Life the Cooperative Way 合作式的生活模式
sangsang 发表于 2008/12/13 9:33:00 |
Britain has lots of cooperative supermarkets. I’m not saying that all these supermarkets are helpful; I’m simply saying that that’s what a lot of them are called. People often do their shopping at their local “co-op”, and all these little shops are part of the “cooperative group”.
The name is interesting. When you see “cooperative” written above the shop, it seems to be saying it’s different—not like other shops that are uncooperative and unhelpful.
Certainly, co-op supermarkets aren’t like the private ones—Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and so on. You can become a member of the co-op, and they’ll send you vouchers once a year to make your shopping a bit cheaper.
The co-op is different in other ways, too. It says it has more “fair-trade” products; that not so many pesticides are used in growing its fruit and vegetables; and that the plastic bags it gives you are biodegradable.
There’s also a cooperative bank. Is that possible? Can banks be cooperative? Well, the co-op actually sends out brochures with advice on how to spend less money—and that certainly isn’t normal. Banks usually try to give you credit cards to make you spend even more money.
The cooperative bank also tells its customers how to save electricity, how to recycle, and how to choose “green” products. It says it will not invest in unethical projects. This is excellent. It almost makes you more optimistic.
It doesn’t end there, either. You can have cooperative holidays, too, or cooperative insurance. We have all had uncooperative holidays, flying from uncooperative airports and staying in uncooperative hotels.
There is also “cooperative funeral care” for when you have a death in the family. There’s a branch down the road, next door to the local co-op supermarket. You can buy a pint of milk and a loaf of bread, and book a visit to the crematorium all in one go.
This is a good thing: funerals can be as uncooperative as anything else, and it’s not always the fault of the funeral service. A friend of mine once said she wanted her funeral to take place in the chapel she went to every Sunday. This was located in a modern building on the first floor. The coffin had to be taken up in a very small lift made for four or five people. The funeral service was as cooperative as it could be, but one couldn’t really say the same about the person in the coffin.
So in general, there’s a lot to be said for cooperative businesses, and if you often use something that’s part of the co-op, it’s worth becoming a member; that way you get your shopping a bit cheaper. The more you spend, the bigger the dividend they give you.
Surely the system they use at the funeral service can’t be exactly like the supermarket, though. If the funeral service did this, it would encourage its customers to become mass murderers. You can’t really do that if you’re a modern, ethical organization.
Perhaps it was different in the old days. Some extraordinary theories have been put forward about Jack the Ripper. But I think we can safely say that this is the first time anyone has suggested that Jack the Ripper went round killing all those poor women in 19th-century London just so that he could get the extra points on his co-op dividend card and make the bill for his shopping a bit cheaper.
cooperative supermarket 个体合作式连锁超市
voucher 代金券
fair-trade product 公平贸易货品pesticide 杀虫剂，农药
biodegradable 可由微生物分解的
brochure 小册子
unethical 不道德的
optimistic 乐观的
funeral 葬礼
crematorium 火葬场
chapel 小教堂
coffin 棺材
dividend 红利，回报
Jack the Ripper 开膛手杰克
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