Roperos: Corner-store power

Thursday, December 29, 2011

THERE was the report in the business page of this daily the other day that said that the retail industry in our country showed robust development this year. The reason for its strength is “high consumer optimism and a strong local economy.” This is an economic reality that has long been recognized and accepted by our government as a backbone of the economic program that was plotted out during the martial law years.

In fact, the Samahang Nayon program of the late ‘70s started the cooperative movement in the country. I recall that the economic planners of then president Ferdinand Marcos saw the economic influence of the retail stores in the nation’s economy. It did not only function as marketing arm but also as a socio-political information center of the community. After all, where did local folks gather to gossip and drink?

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In fact, one of the most successful cooperatives in the country today is in Cebu. It started as a Samahang Nayon project in the late ‘70s in Barangay Lamac of Pinamungahan town. I knew because it was the members of my staff, as regional director of information for Central Visayas, that organized the Samahang Nayon that metamorphosed into the multi-million-peso cooperative that it is today.

In those days, the economic planners realized the political potential of the cooperatives. The retail business at that time was largely in the hands of a few Chinese-Filipino businessmen whose economic hold of the industry easily swayed serious political influence in the countryside.

Consequently, President Marcos, shrewd politician that he was, must have realized that he needs to have a strong political hold of the rural sector, and the best way to do it was the organization of villages into manageable pockets of political groups that would all be beholden to the local political leaders there. Thus, the retail industry became the core of economic, social, and political influence of the country.

Today, all throughout the land, we celebrate the virtue of valor, the ideal of courage and heroism of the small and seemingly insignificant feature of our economy—-the network of small retail stores that laced the countryside--bringing to the doorstep of our average mass consumers the products of our economy, as well as the assurance that a marketing network that would serve as a mass commodity distribution arm will always be there.

As we celebrate today the recognition of the Filipinos’ heroism, we also fittingly recognize a puny economic cog that has withstood the various economic turbulence of our history to backstop the economic survival of the republic.