Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Purchasing: Competition?

[Becky Weaver (beckyweaver]

--- "Louis-H. Campagna" <lhcampagna [at] hotmail.com>
wrote:

> 
> Hi, Our cohousing project is in the midst of a
> debate regarding the use of competition in our
> purchasing process.  

My community is in the development phase.

I would caution against setting up rigid rules &
systems just for the purpose of having one overarching
"principle" informing all your purchasing activites. 

Empower your committees and members (as it sounds like
you have) to use their judgement about the best
process in each circumstance. If someone makes a poor
decision, talk it over and learn from that. In the
long run, that will make your community stronger than
setting up a lot of structure ahead of time to enforce
something abstract. 

An example - you need some gardening tools for the
community, and there are a couple of items nobody
already has that they're willing to donate. Might
someone be willing to keep an eye out for those items
when they go garage-saleing for over the next few
months? Maybe that's a great solution in this case.
But that doesn't mean you need a rule that the
community will always try to purchase items
secondhand. 

If you're discussing an overarching purchasing policy,
you could argue all day about which types of items
ought to be purchased secondhand, how much effort
needs to go into looking for a used item before buying
new, etc. Whereas in a specific case, it's easy - is
someone willing to look for the item secondhand? How
soon do you need it? "If Eleanor can't find a used one
by March, let's buy a mid-priced one at the local
garden center." Done.  

Remember, your community members' time and energy is a
finite resource too. Don't burn people out. 

You will all bring somewhat different values and
priorities and goals to your community. If you try to
set up a rigid policy as a way to enforce one system
of values for your community, then while you're
developing this policy you will find a lot of
disagreement among your members about exactly what
they want the community's values to be. 

For some values, this discussion may be necessary. For
others, not so much. In the case of purchasing policy,
I think that you'll experience a lot of friction and
resentment per dollar saved, unless you purposely keep
the system and guidelines fairly loose. 

A looser set of guidelines can allow community members
to express their own values even if they're not
exactly the same as someone else's. This will allow
people to contibute to the community in their own way,
using their personal gifts to make a personal
contribution. This will raise your community's overall
energy. Putting everybody in a box with strict rules
will drain that energy.   

In our community, for the really big-ticket items,
purchasing & negotiating for the actual construction
is being done by our developer. This is a huge task,
and the person doing it needs to get paid. Developers
usually already have established relationships with
suppliers, and in that context the three-bid process
is not always the most cost-effective way to do
construction. Choose a developer you feel good about,
and then let them do their job in the way they believe
is best.  

In terms of professionals and staff, again I think
that intangibles such as who has a good "feel" for
your community are extremely important, and hard to
quantify for comparison/competition purposes. The
qualities various professionals bring to a project
often don't map neatly to a comparison spreadsheet.
You will be building a team in which all members need
to work together; you're not purchasing a commodity. 

In my job I work for a sales team in a complex
service-oriented industry. We often get the purchasing
departments of large corporations attempting to
commoditize our services. They draw up charts, I fill
out questionnaires, we negotiate contracts. And then
the scientific staff who are our actual customers do
everything they can to circumvent the purchasing
departments' rules, in order to get what they *really*
want; good quality work based on good working
relationships with conscientious, ethical vendors. 

Often we'll "lose" a competitive bidding process, then
six months later the purchasers come back to us and
set us up as vendors anyway, having been burned by the
low bidders who agreed to great terms, then could not
deliver the necessary quality of services. Clearly
competition *is* beneficial in the marketplace, but if
you go that route, be very careful about what your
needs are. Don't let "objectivity" stand in the way of
your most important priorities. 

I think that when large companies buy truckloads of
toilet paper, the competition approach is very
worthwhile. In the context of a small community buying
a few cartons of toilet paper every few months, the
extra complications are probably not worth it unless
you have a community member who enjoys
comparison-shopping and competitive purchasing. If you
do have (or are) such a member, then your community is
fortunate. Such a person can make those activities
their personal contribution, based on their own values
and gifts. 

Becky Weaver
Kaleidoscope Village
Austin, Texas