Mission Statement

Our aim is to:

• Create a community of actively participating members;
• Foster a healthy connection to the food we eat, the people who grow it, and the other organizations who share our beliefs;
• Co-operatively educate ourselves on environmental issues;
• Exercise political and economic control over our food;

by operating a viable co-operative food store.

Summer 2010 Chronicle

Table of Contents

• #1 Drops A Line
• Report From the General Manager
• Report From the Treasurer
• In the Aisle
• Money & Membership
• Meet the Board
• Coffee Intrigue Part 2
• What Has Become of Our Room?
• Mono Not Good for Anyone
• Letter From the Road
• Strawberry Recipes

Read the latest issue of the Chronicle [PDF]

Join the Community Development Committee

The Community Development committee has openings for Karma members who are looking to share their skills and time. Of particular interest are people with experience in event planning, community outreach, advertising, design, PR, or related fields.

For more details and contact info: Community Development Committee

Preliminary planning for the 2010 AGM in October has begun. See the AGM page for more details about proposed by-law changes.

New Cash Registers

Karma's new cash registers were brought on-line the morning of Monday, June 28, 2010. That date was chosen to give people a few days to solve any last-minute problems before the switchover to HST in July. Fortunately, all of the important problems had been solved in earlier testing, and the transitions to the new system and the new tax both went very smoothly.

As currently implemented, the main advantages are the collection of more detailed purchases and fees information and its rapid transfer to an office computer for further processing. To let us collect this information, cashiers have been given a few more keys to learn, but so far retraining has gone surprisingly well, requiring only a few minutes at the start of each member labour shift. An important secondary advantage is that supplies and service are available for the new system, while the older cash registers urgently required replacement simply because they were apparently on the verge of failing unrepairably.

Howard Kaplan has done all of the programming and configuration that is visible so far. This included learning the cash registers' new features, discussing them with the Justin McNabb, deciding which ones would be useful at Karma, and programming them into keys that accomplish a lot of work with very few keystrokes. It also included integrating the cash registers' output files with our existing cash report system, to reduce both time and errors when the staff prepare their nightly cash reports and the bookkeeper transfers the data to our financial database. In the future, the cash registers' output will also be integrated with the member records system, allowing faster updates when fees are paid.

Another important piece of programming is not yet visible to shoppers. Andrea Rosen has developed a database application for maintaining a catalog of our barcoded products, and Justin McNabb has been working on keeping the data current as products or prices change. In a few months, we will be ready to copy this catalog to the cash registers and scan many of our products. At that time, we will no longer apply price labels to the barcoded products; instead, their prices will be marked on shelf tags printed from the same database. In addition, detailed sales information will let the staff manage inventory better, reducing both over-purchasing and out-of-stock situations.

General Manager Justin McNabb rings through Board member Arel Agnew's order, one of the last ones processed on the old cash registers.

One of the old cash registers, just before its decommissioning at the end of the working day on Sunday, June 27th 2010

General Manager Justin McNabb, along with members Annika and John, ring through the first order using the new cash registers on Monday, June 28th 2010.

The latest board minutes and related documents (May 2010) have been posted on the board minutes page.

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Older news and events items can be found in the News and Events Archive