Author: Miss Cellania / Source: Neatorama
(Image credit: Consumers Union)
Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
From literary advocacy to union battles to communism claims, the origin story of the organization that publishes Consumer Reports kind of has it all.
Last year, a consumer advocate showed up in the most unlikely place: On YouTube, the home of the no-questions-asked unboxing channel. Cody Crouch, aka iTwe4kz, reviewed a set of earbuds from a company called Kanoa. In a Nike hat and a Puma sleeveless shirt, Crouch (who was clearly frustrated) trashed the earbuds at length and questioned the behavior of the com
pany that was banking on him to give a good review. The company, blaming Crouch’s bad review for spooking investors, shut down, with thousands of paying consumers left in the lurch. However, it’s now widely believed that the company was running a scam, only made a few pairs of headphones, and used Crouch’s review as an out. Now, there’s talk of class-action lawsuits. This might sound like a crazy story, but it’s nothing compared to the tale that gave us the modern consumer advocacy movement. Strap in and we’ll get to testing.
The standards nerds who formed the basis of the consumer rights’ movement
The thing about watching a video from a guy like iTwe4kz is that you’re watching, really, for his opinion, which is likely to be loud, brash, opinionated, and not entirely impartial. That’s not a knock on him. That’s just the way YouTube works—we watch videos for the opinions shared.
But the problem, of course, is that biases swing in all directions, and in a world where you’re getting marketing at every single second. A lot of people read this in their inboxes. And a lot of the messages surrounding it are often promotional or marketing in nature.
And the problem, over the years, has gotten worse. How do you rein it all in?
It was just this sort of problem that inspired authors Stuart Chase and Frederick J. Schlink, who wrote a book titled Your Money’s Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer’s Dollar, in 1927.
The authors were well-positioned to write such a book. Schlink spent years working in various standards bodies, including the United States Bureau of Standards and the American Standards Association (now the American National Standards Institute).
Rare and Out-of-Print Trading and Financial Books)
Chase, meanwhile, was an economist with ties to both the Federal Trade Commission and a union-services group called the Labor Bureau. He was also a figure in the Technical Alliance, a group of engineers that pushed for rational solutions to removing waste from the capitalist system. (The latter organization, a figurehead for a technocracy movement, gained currency during the Great Depression, but ultimately faded from view.)
These two men, basically standards nerds who in a way saw commerce as almost a form of engineering, saw the issues raised by the large amount of marketing that consumers were getting constantly bombarded with and aimed for a way to solve the problem: By objectively testing products based on incredibly rigorous standards.
From a passage in the first chapter of the book, which can be read in full on the Library of Congress website:
For the expenditure of about a million dollars, it would be possible to take every current type of motor car made, over a standardized 10,000-mile road test under controlled conditions. (One million dollars is roughly the equivalent of Mr. Ford’s output every two hours.) At the close of the experiment, the figures for each make could be published in parallel columns, without comment. Just the cold figures—so many miles per gallon of gas and oil, so many failures of one kind or another per 1,000 miles, so much braking ability from a given speed, so much accelerating capacity, so much tire wear, and so on. Would this help you in choosing your next car? Not if you were buying primarily to make an impression on the neighbors. But if you really wanted to get back of the advertising, the high-powered salesman, and the dandy little jiggers on the dashboard, and find out what was the best car for your needs and for your money—it would help tremendously. As the motor car becomes increasingly a utility and decreasingly an emblem of swank, the help to the main body of purchasers would be untold. In the end such a list would set up standards of performing excellence, and force persistently inferior types off the market altogether. For the million-dollar outlay—in a three billion dollar a year industry—who shall say what savings in hundreds of millions would be repaid to the American people?
Your Money’s Worth spoke about the dangers of quackery, the importance of standards, and the ways that people trying to make a quick buck misrepresent themselves. The duo goes through a laundry list of people trying to screw the 1920s public out of their money.
We believe that the foregoing evidence indicates only too clearly that there are significant groups of products, in which the production of sound goods, accurately described, and sold at a fair price, has not been the dominating motive of those in control of the process,” the authors write in a chapter on companies that misrepresent themselves. “We have seen that in the case of refrigerators, soap and cleansing agents, textiles, furs, weighing scales, paints, heating and cooking devices, varnishes, even loaves of bread, there exists an enormous burden of adulteration, bad workmanship, misrepresentation, sharp practice, and even downright bodily danger, which falls back upon the consumer. And who shall say how much is preventable if the consumer could be armed with the findings of impartial analysis and test?
(Perhaps those who spent their hard-earned money on Kanoa headphones should read this book.)
The book was a mainstream success, of course, and was a selection in the Book of the Month Club, ensuring it had a mainstream audience.
This mainstream attention created an opportunity for the two men to help tackle the issues with testing and validation that were sorely lacking from the consumer space. In…
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