Why Yellowknife Co-op wants to change its name – and trading area

If a special meeting on April 8 goes the way the board hopes, the Yellowknife Direct Charge Co-op will become the Lakeshore Co-op.

The co-op’s directors have called a virtual meeting for 6pm that night – you can find out how to attend it here if you’re a member. There are some interesting items on the agenda.

One is the name change. Another is changing the designated “trading area” in the co-op’s bylaws, which is currently limited to Yellowknife, Ndılǫ, Dettah and Behchokǫ̀.

The new trading area would include those communities plus Fort Resolution, Fort Providence, Hay River, Fort Smith and Enterprise – if members vote to accept the alterations.

The Yellowknife Direct Charge Co-op is one of three large grocery stores in the NWT’s capital (the others are both Your Independent Grocer franchises under Loblaw.)

Mark Needham is the president of the city co-op’s board of directors.

“We’ve talked about changing our name for, I would say, probably 10 years. The rationale was that we’re no longer a direct charge co-op and we haven’t been for close to 15 years,” Needham told Cabin Radio on Thursday.

A direct charge co-op means the members, who are also the owners, pay a fee to shop there.

In the 1980s, a family might be expected to pay $8 a week to the co-op to help it meet its overheads as a small grocer starting out in Yellowknife. By the 2000s, that fee – the direct charge you pay to use the co-op – had become $1 a week.

“We would have people who went out of town in the winter for 10 weeks, came back, would go in to buy a chocolate bar, and the cost would be $10.79,” said Needham.

“There was a lot of pushback. We realized it was a barrier to doing business, so we removed that. At that point we were no longer, in theory, a direct charge co-op.”

Why Lakeshore?

It has taken the Co-op time to build itself up to the idea of changing the name to drop “direct charge.”

A complicating factor, Needham said, is that the business can’t simply rename itself Yellowknife Co-op, which is what everyone calls it.

“We submitted the paperwork. They came back and said, ‘No, you can’t do that. You can no longer have a co-op started that has a city or a community name in it,'” he said, referring to Federated Co-operatives, which oversees co-ops across western Canada.

It turned out that co-ops in the south are moving away from geographic names, he said, in part because plenty of co-ops are amalgamating to serve several areas at once, then choosing names that avoid a preference for any one community over another.

Armed with that discovery, the Yellowknife Direct Charge Co-op board started trying to come up with names that did not involve “Yellowknife.”

“We’ve probably been doing that now for a little over a year. We came up some with some wingnut ideas and a list of, like, 30 names, and we whittled them down,” said Needham.

Yellowknife sits on Great Slave Lake, as do most of the other communities the Co-op hopes to list in its trading area.

That may be why Lakeshore Co-op was the name ultimately chosen. That is the name on which members will vote on April 8. (In full, it’s Lakeshore Co-operative Limited.)

Why the trading area shift?

Does the proposed trading area change mean the Co-op is looking to move into business in the South Slave? Is something changing?

“Not necessarily, no, but it certainly does give us more flexibility if we did move into another community,” said Needham.

“There wouldn’t be, like, a stigma of ‘this is Yellowknife Co-op taking over Enterprise’ or Fort Providence or Behchokǫ̀ or whatever.”

Needham said the Co-op does have “a couple of things on the go” in terms of projects, without giving specifics.

Even if a plan was afoot to expand to other communities, he said, he wouldn’t be able to discuss it because a non-disclosure agreement would almost certainly be in place.

“We’re always looking at opportunities,” he said. “I know that’s kind-of a dodgy answer, but we’ve had a number of business opportunities come through over the years – some in Yellowknife, some outside of Yellowknife.”

At the moment, the only explicitly stated reason a trading area is defined in the Co-op’s bylaws is to restrict who can be on its board.

You are not eligible to be a director, the bylaws state, if you are connected with any other “retailer selling groceries, prescription drugs, or vehicle fuels as a line of business operations in the trading area.” (There are lots of other disqualifying criteria, too.)

Expanding the trading area on April 8 would have the effect of applying that rule to anyone connected to South Slave grocery stores. It’s not clear, though, if that is a specific concern right now.

A similar change is being proposed regarding elected officials. The newly worded bylaw, if approved, would disqualify the elected officials of more communities from serving on the Co-op’s board.

“We’re looking forward to the meeting, the dialogue with members and getting input and their support for this,” Needham said.

He added he does not expect the name change to cost a huge sum of money if approved.

“It’s not like you’re changing a fleet of 1,000 vehicles or anything like that,” he said.

“The costs are fairly contained.”