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This is how the old Co-operative Society started many years ago, the general public were offered £1 share, each share had a number, I still remember my families numbers, it started I believe as a food outlet, then expanded into clothing, electrical, furniture, butchery, chemists, funeral directors, haberdashery etc, the dividends kept the people loyal, paying out every so often a bonus on the amount they had spent at the stores, you could also get Mutualality tokens to spend in the stores payable over 20 weeks at no extra cost, these were collected by a regular collector weekly, Roly Ecoff used to collect ours, this sort of thing helped the less fortunate, to get what they needed in clothes or furniture that they could not go and buy outright,
This is a good idea of Alexanders, there are a lot of people out there that live on the breadline, and taking out a share that would pay a bonus perhaps yearly to start with, gradualy bringing it to quarterly would encourage people to join