The first Sokos department store was opened in Helsinki in the Olympic year 1952. Designed by Erkki Huttunen, the building hosted not only the department store but also Hotel Vaakuna and Helsingin Osuuskauppa cooperative's sizable restaurant, which people started calling Hehtaari-Hokki (= Hectare HOK).

After the wars, the cooperative activities built around the Pellervo Confederation of Finnish Cooperatives carried a significant role in the reconstruction work of the Finnish society.The resettlement and resurrection of the countryside was carried out with the help of cooperative shops, cooperative banks and producers' cooperatives.The core idea in the cooperative movement, responsibility, was even further emphasised in difficult times.

Read more on responsibility in S Group.

In the years that followed the wars, S Group started to systematically build department stores and hotels in the centres of many cities.

Alongside retail sales, the hotel and restaurant field grew into a significant business.

The first Sokos department store was opened on Mannerheimintie in Helsinki in the Olympic year 1952.Hotel Vaakuna also started operations in the same building.Sokos was soon to become the most well-known brand in S Group, and the name Sokos was also extended to smaller shops and units in other business areas, such as machinery and hardware shops.At its most, there were over a hundred Sokos shops around Finland.Hotels were also named after the best-known brand as Sokos Hotels.

For more remote locations, the most significant innovation in the 1950s were mobile shops.The regional cooperative in Lohja acquired a mobile shop in 1952, and by the end of the decade, already over two hundred cooperative mobile shops travelled the roads.

At the turn of the 1960s, the structural change in society also affected S Group.As migration from the countryside accelerated, the position of S Group got more and more difficult since the main focus of its operations was still in the countryside.This shift was noticed within S Group, but it was not reckoned with. Competing trading companies, however, sharpened their operations and directed them specifically to the cities, where new jobs started to emerge.

This marked the beginning of the second crisis in cooperative activities, which was to endure from the end of the 1960s to the mid-1980s, culminating in the viewpoint differences between the countryside and the cities.