Edinburgh Bicycle Co-operative

Great service
Apr 23rd, 2023

Jan 7th, 2023

Jan 1st, 2023

Grabbed some winter gear and sorted out my bike. Good stock and service overall
Sep 5th, 2022

Bought a bike from them (C2W) and their staffs are so friendly and knowledgeable! Also, their bikes comes with service arrangements in the first year which is handy. Edit: after a year of ownership, Ive had 2 free maintenance and inspections done which comes with the purchase. I must say Im happy that it was offered free but probably wont come back for them in the future, for reasons below: 1. Can be difficult to get a appointment, sometimes the nearest is more than a month away 2. Expensive for what they are, especially I felt not much has been done to the bike (to justify the price, no material included) 3. I learned that despite being the longest established workers co-operative here in Scotland (whatever that means), they dont pay their workers a living wage (!!!), and theres little room for promotion if working in stores. This combined with the previous point just turns me off from offering them business in the future Edit/response: 1. I work in the financial services sector hence checked your audited financial statements (FS) before commenting. Your latest FS is a standard FRS101 FS and DOES NOT include an audited section on the organisation paying a living wage. The scoping listed in auditors statements as well as auditors opinion also provided NO assurance over your coop paying all staffs a living wage 2. Ive raised your comment to the Living Wage Foundation, who in writing confirmed youre not (at any point) an accredited living wage employer. They also noted that they strongly discourage paying a big part of salary as a performance-linked bonus as it prevents staffs to plan their own finance (I know thats a common issue in the coop sector, but I dont think its unfixable, all needs to be done is to have better guaranteed pay and less proportion paid as bonus). They however admitted without seeing full membership agreements while not having an accreditation with them, one cannot be certain you do/do not pay a living wage. 3. Having looked into academic literature covering your organisation, it appears that it does take at least a year to become a member of the coop (which is reflected on your FS, where you have more staffs than coop members), and your distribution of the bonus pot only applies to coop members - meaning some could be paid even less than others. 4. I admit with only evidence from some previous staffs it might be premature to conclude you dont pay a living wage (but only minimum wage), however the concern over pay remains based on information you have disclosed. In fact I personally tried to use headcount as well as the ratio between top paid/least paid disclosed in academic literature on your coop to make a rough estimation over pay, and concluded it is likely that there are staffs paid less than living wage (the flaw in my model is I assumed most work full-time, which is problematic) esp these non-members. However if we are serious on the issue, I see no reason why we cant a) become accredited by the Living Wage Foundation (worth noting they DO NOT conduct checks after accreditation is being given hence there can only be somewhat limited assurance) b) disclose your coop membership agreement and detailed pay arrangements to the public. If were even more serious, we can have assurance over all staffs being paid a living wage put in the scope of your annual audit on top of the financial statements audit.
Feb 14th, 2023