Music Appreciation

appalachiablue

(42,822 posts) Mon Sep 2, 2024, 02:18 PM Sep 2

⛏ Sixteen Tons, Johnny Cash (I Owe My Soul to the Company Store)

Last edited Mon Sep 2, 2024, 04:28 PM - Edit history (1)

(Wiki, ed). - A company store is a retail store selling a limited range of food, clothing and daily necessities to employees of a company. It is typical of a company town in a remote area where virtually everyone is employed by one firm, such as a coal mine. In a company town, the housing is owned by the company but there may be independent stores there or nearby.

Employee-only company stores often accept scrip or non-cash vouchers issued by the company.

Company stores were monopolistic institutions, funneling workers' incomes back to the owners of the company. This is because company stores often faced little or no competition for workers' earnings on account of their geographical remoteness, the inability and/or unwillingness of other nearby merchants (if any existed) to accept company scrip, or both. Prices, therefore, were typically high.

Allowing purchases on credit enforced a kind of debt slavery, obligating employees to remain with the company until the debt was cleared...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store
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- Company SCRIP is scrip (a substitute for government-issued legal tender or currency) issued by a company to pay its employees. It can only be exchanged in company stores owned by the employers.. The use of coal scrip dates to the late 1800s as coal companies looked for a way to increase their profits (although the stated reason for using scrip was to eliminate keeping large cash reserves).

Rather than receiving compensation in U.S. currency, many miners received payment entirely in scrip, which could be used only at a store owned by the coal company (called a company store). Coal companies would also advance miners their wages in scrip, but would pay from 50% to 80% of their wages for such advances (a form of early payday loans).

The result was a situation in which miners were perpetually in debt to their employer, receiving only an "advance against unearned wages." Moreover, because the company store was often the only place to spend scrip, the company could charge exorbitant prices in these rural communities compared to prices in major cities.

There was no uniform design, but each coin generally identified the location of the coal company town and predominantly featured the words "non-transferrable" to communicate to recipients it could not be transferred for U.S. currency. Coal scrip was deemed unconstitutional if non-transferable in the early 20th cent., but continued to exist in Kentucky and West Virginia until officially outlawed by Congress in 1967...+ Images, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip