Today's consumer co-operatives have become big and made federations of their business functions, as merchandising. We visited two contrastive areas, one is the metropolitan area and another is local city in the Tohoku area, and compared four typical co-operatives and their federations. The results are as follows ;
1.Kyoritsu-sha Co-operative based local city in the Tohoku area has strong tie to the area economy and local dietary culture, however, that tie of the co-ops in the metropolitan area has been weakened.
2.Business functions of co-ops have been concentrated to the each federations, more strongly in the metropolitan area co-ops, and the separation between members organization and business functions has been appeared.
3.Members organization of co-ops has been changing from based on the Han group system to the individual system, more strongly co-ops in the metropolitan areas.