Southern Coop

[TheUKHighStreet]

All the Southern Coop stores that are branded as Coop Food have an issue.
An example:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/318988430
It wants to either change the Operator to "Central England Co-operative" or "Heart of England Co-operative Society". This is the same for any co-op stores that are tagged with Southern Coop as the operator. I've had a look at the files and I'm not sure why this is.

[Cj-Malone]

The example seems like it should be "The Co-operative Food", not "Co-op Food". https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8153851,-0.4471901,3a,75y,104.1h,90.18t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sz8UMejt6ntDwuiogfGWFRg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-0.18174162533443905%26panoid%3Dz8UMejt6ntDwuiogfGWFRg%26yaw%3D104.1034276486439!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDQwMS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

[TheUKHighStreet]

I've removed all the branding on that shop and tagged it as a shop. Then I tried to change the tag to a Southern Coop convenience store so the default tags were added. This adds the brand "The Co-operative Food" with wikidata "Q107617274" and operator "The Southern Co-operative" with operator wikidata "Q7569773". However it also adds an issue and wants to change the operator. Any idea why?

[UKChris-osm]

The example seems like it should be "The Co-operative Food", not "Co-op Food".

My local shop is also branded as "The Co-operative Food", but it seems The Co-operative Food isn't in the NSI as a standalone brand, and is just a sub-set within the operator category.

Perhaps the operator category is the issue, and instead we should just remove that from the equation entirely and add The Co-operative Food as a brand individually, without any operator association?

[UKChris-osm]

#11089

[TheUKHighStreet]

Ah - thank you. I'd very much prefer to find the fix and still have Southern Coop as the operator but as this problem has obviously been around for a while maybe there isn't a fix.

[TheUKHighStreet]

It's very strange that there seems to be no difference between the entries for Southern Coop, Central Coop and Heart of England Coop. I don't understand why Central and Heart of England allow the The Co-operative Food as a brand but Southern doesn't. There must be something else somewhere that we are missing?

[UKChris-osm]

In a previous thread we came to the conclusion that there might be a bug in the iD editor, but as that's something we can't really fix from the NSI side (aside from removing the operator tags completely), I think it was just forgotten about.

[Cj-Malone]

As far as I'm aware, "The Coop Group" tried to get all of the "coops" to use the "4 leaf coop" branding. Southern Coop didn't switch and still uses the green branding. Assuming this is still true, brand=Coop Food, operator=Southern is invalid. Brand=the cooperative food, operator=southern is the correct way to tag it.

Southern coop:

4 leaf coop branding (in this case, coop group):

Having said this, nothing can correctly handle this. It's too complicated for OSM mappers, iD has issue with multiple matches and brand vs operator, NSI can't keep up to date with this mess. Not even Google handles this correctly, often having duplicates, especially with ScotMid. I support removing the operators, I added them. It's too complex.

[TheUKHighStreet]

Agree - having gone through a few now, people seem to have accepted some of the presets and changed Southern to Central anyway, so having this problem is leading to incorrect tagging.

[UKChris-osm]

I've removed the branding from each operator, and created a separate brand entry for The Co-operative Food via 21f5951 but have retained the operator entries for the moment as I can't say with any certainty that they all operate their stores using The Co-operative Food, unless anyone knows for sure?

[TheUKHighStreet]

Southern Coop also has Welcome stores which has been added as a brand. I think that The Co-operative Food probably also needs adding as a supermarket brand. I haven't looked at Central and Heart of England Coop yet.

[TheUKHighStreet]

Looking at Central England Co-operative, they seem to have 2 different brands on the food stores. They seem to be grouped by region so it could be to do with when the smaller cooperatives were merged. The shops branded with green signs are named The Cooperative {name of place} rather than The Cooperative Food. And the others have a green COOP sign which is the Central England Coop brand. I'm not sure how the two food brands affect things on here.

They also have florists so I've just added a brand to the florist.json.

[TheUKHighStreet]

I've just found this from January:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cje14pg554xo
So maybe Central England Co-operative no longer exists!

[Cj-Malone]

https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2026/04/co-op-group-lines-up-southern-co-op-deal-in-300-site-expansion-move/ 🙃