SOURCE: OpEdNews

March 26, 2008

By Joan Brunwasser

Who’s Watching Your Back? Part 1: You, The American Consumer

Sitting with my fellow campers beside a bonfire on a crisp Wisconsin summer evening long, long ago, I had an out of body experience. Girlish voices joining in plaintive harmony, the words drifted upward along with the curling smoke. Our song, the smell of the pine needles carpeting the campgrounds and making a fragrant canopy above, the crackling fire, the brilliant stars- all came together in a veritable feast of the senses. I felt attuned to our connectedness to one another and to the natural world around us. The moment was exquisite, fleeting and hard to recapture.

In the past several generations, our extended families have been dispersed and our mobility has reduced our sense of community. We have become divorced from nature and isolated from one another. Interdependence has somehow come to be seen as a sign of weakness. Ironically, the more ‘civilized’ we have become, the more we are limited to our own individual and meager resources.

But while we no longer need the pack to stalk and kill our food, we surely do need one another for security and protection, not to mention emotional support. In no other place do we find safety in numbers more than in the marketplace.

Once upon a time, we made our own tools or traded with those whose craftsmanship we knew and trusted. The smithy making substandard goods was identified and censured via the quick and efficient community grapevine. Losing face where his family might have lived for generations was a powerful sanction. There was literally no place to hide. He had only two choices: improve his product or go out of business.

Today, manufacturers are insulated from their consumer base with many layers. All too often, production has been outsourced overseas, customer service is nonexistent, and it is difficult to obtain quality and safety product information . Product advertising is more like group brainwashing to convince the public to buy products they can easily live without. Recalls are exceedingly rare; when they happen, it is invariably only after enough victims have already suffered death, disfigurement or debilitating illness from a faulty product. Civil litigation, product liability cases, and class action suits are time consuming and often prohibitively expensive. Companies with deep pockets and platoons of lawyers easily defeat consumer legal actions.

Several Examples of the Marketplace in Action

Recently, we experienced the largest recall of meat in US history – 143 million pounds – because the Humane Society obtained a video showing slaughterhouse workers processing cows, possibly diseased, that were too sick or weak to stand. This meat was sent to school hot lunch programs. The USDA’s undersecretary for food and safety was quoted as saying "We are very confident in the safety of the food supply."

Neither the slaughterhouse nor the government are watching your back. Where does this leave the American carnivore? Should we inspect all of the meat packers’ operations ourselves? Just how would we do that?

The hugely popular Ford Pinto of the ‘70s is a textbook example of Big Business putting profits ahead of safety. Ford rushed the Pinto into production to combat stiff competition from abroad, slashing the 43-month process to a mere 25. A faulty design left the fuel tank vulnerable in a rear-end collision. This flaw was discovered before production had actually begun but, because the assembly line was already tooled, they decided to go ahead anyway. According to documents presented in court, Ford had calculated that at $11 per car, it would be less expensive to handle the inevitable lawsuits than to fix the problem. A number of people were killed or badly burned when their fuel tanks exploded upon impact and they were trapped inside. “The barbeque that seats four” resulted in lawsuits that ultimately cost the automaker hundreds of millions of dollars and the recall of millions of Pintos. Ironically, a safer fuel tank design existed and was already in use in the Ford Capri, but was discarded for the Pinto because of strict guidelines for maximal trunk space.

Like NASA’s subsequent Challenger disaster, Ford’s Pinto experience confirmed that manufacturers rarely take actions that cost them more money if they don’t absolutely have to, even in matters of safety. As Lee Iococca, president of Ford and captain of the Pinto project, famously claimed, “safety doesn’t sell.” Iococca and Ford certainly weren’t looking out for you. They were looking out for themselves.

The American Consumer: How We Choose What We Buy

How we spend our money says a lot about who we are and what we value. How do we choose what we buy? We look at quality, features and, of course, price. With big-ticket purchases, the process becomes more complicated, and the quality of the service department becomes an important factor. We spend a lot more time with the service department over the life of any big ticket item than with the salesman who sold it to us.

For big ticket items, I like to do some research and for that, I head to the library and Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports is an equalizer, putting the consumer on a more level playing field with the powerful manufacturers and retailers. L.L. Bean still fully guarantees its merchandise 100% for as long as you own it. This gold standard for customer service is an endangered species nowadays. “You bought it, it’s yours. Now, whaddaya gonna do about it?” is what you’re more likely to hear upon voicing a complaint. That is why we all need someone to stand up for the consumer.

Consumer Reports – towards “a fair, just and safe marketplace”

Consumer Reports (CR) has been a household name for decades. Consumers Union (CU), which publishes Consumer Reports, describes themselves as:

An expert, independent nonprofit organization whose mission is to work for a fair, just, and safe marketplace for all consumers and to empower consumers to protect themselves. To achieve this mission, we test, inform, and protect.

Consumers Union is now the largest independent consumer testing lab in the world. Their command center is a state-of-the-arts complex in Yonkers, NY, with 50 labs for investigating various consumer goods. Fifty-five cars are tested each year at a separate, 327-acre compound in Connecticut.

Early on, CU made the costly but necessary decision to accept no free samples to preserve the organization’s impartiality and independence. As a result, the first car evaluations were funded by an independently wealthy expert, who bought or borrowed every model that was slated for testing. During the Depression, CR was forced to turn its research to inexpensive household products, like hot water bottles or electric fans, simply because they lacked funds for bigger ticket items. This commitment to creating informed consumers obviously struck a chord. A circulation of 100,000 in 1946 skyrocketed to 400,000 only four years later, and reached 5 million by 1992.

Educating the public to make intelligent choices was not without peril. Consumers Union was on the House Un-American Activities Committee list of subversive organizations in the 1940s and into the ‘50s. CU’s response:

If the condemnation of worthless, adulterated, and misrepresented products is a communistic activity, then the Federal Food & Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the American Medical Association must be paid direct from Moscow.

Today, Consumer Reports represents mainstream American consumerism. The millions of copies sold make it one of America’s most popular magazines, the online version hugely successful as well. Their independence, integrity, and thorough analysis make Consumer Reports a good resource for anyone contemplating a purchase of virtually anything.

Testing

How does CU test the various products? According to their website:

State-of-the-art testing equipment is always used and is sometimes complemented by equipment designed by our engineers. The actual tests are based not only on government and industry standards but also on standards our specialists think should apply.

For each product review, the magazine recaps how they test and then derive their conclusions. Every issue of CR lists the names and specialties of over 100 testing experts. No smoke and mirrors here. Everything is out in the open for anyone to see, instilling confidence in the entire enterprise.

CU uses various criteria to evaluate products, such as frequency of repairs, features, product history (including safety and recall information), owner satisfaction, comparisons with similar products by other manufacturers, warranty, and of course, price. Every year, over a million members of their consumer network in 65 cities across the country fill out questionnaires about product history and reliability. Recall and safety bulletins are published as soon as they come in.

Informing: Consumer Reports as Global Grapevine

Publicity – lots of it – gives CU clout. Shoddy workmanship and poor customer service don’t remain a secret for long; conversely, companies know that a good review will bring huge rewards. Unable to influence the report’s outcome in the case of a poor review, a manufacturer’s only recourse is to take the criticism to heart and improve their product. And that’s the whole idea. If manufacturers had been uniformly receptive to consumer concerns in the first place, there would have been no need for anyone to intercede on the consumers’ behalf.

A 1988 article from the New York Times, “Consumer’s World; How Consumers Union Puts Teeth Into 'Let The Seller Beware'” states: “The magazine's monthly product evaluations send out shock waves, affecting sales, advertising, production and stock prices. Trade journals regularly report the phenomenon.”

The threat of extensive financial fall-out from sub-par goods is motivation enough to deliver high quality. And all this attention is lavished on simple, everyday goods like snacks, batteries, and deodorants, as well as high-end items like cars, travel, and health care options.

Protecting: Consumers Union is Watching Your Back

Consumer Reports is not the only consumer watchdog out there, but it is the prototype of an organization making a positive impact by raising public awareness. Beyond testing and informing consumers, CU further protects the public by bringing consumer issues to government’s attention, testifying before legislative bodies, petitioning, consulting and filing lawsuits on behalf of the public.

Consumers Union is the exemplar for responsible testing. CU’s efforts prove that it is possible to provide the public with information to make intelligent choices regarding consumer purchases, and to raise consumer expectations within industry and government. Keep this paradigm in mind, and stay tuned for the second part in the series, when I draw a parallel to the most important American product of all – our democratic elections! Consumers Union’s watching your back. Let’s see who’s looking out for the American voter.

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Many thanks to Nancy Tobi for her editing suggestions and skills.

Authors Bio: Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which exists for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. We aim to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Electronic (computerized) voting systems are simply antithetical to democratic principles.

CER set up a lending library to achieve the widespread distribution of the DVD Invisible Ballots: A temptation for electronic vote fraud. Within eighteen months, the project had distributed over 3200 copies across the country and beyond. CER now concentrates on group showings, OpEd pieces, articles, reviews, interviews, discussion sessions, networking, conferences, anything that promotes awareness of this critical problem. Joan has been Voting Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005.