Consumer Movement Is in a State of Flux

It seems strange. Here comes National Consumers Week, rung in by a presidential proclamation celebrating “the ingenuity of American business,” the “wonderful variety of goods and services,” the “nation’s productivity and technological leadership.” President Bush does see some “unique challenges” coming, but all for the consumer, who must learn “to be responsible and discerning,” to develop “the ability to read labels, to follow written instructions and to balance a checkbook.”

So much for disclosure, truth in labeling, clear writing and the consumer movement as some remember it--concerned with consumer rights and protections. National Consumers Week is a mishmash of exhortations and promotion “coordinated” by the U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs and sponsored by business.

Posters (80,000) are provided by Sears, Roebuck & Co., brochures (150,000) by the National Futures Assn., the official reception by NBC’s Consumer News & Business Channel. The result: consumers get some “tips on shopping wisely,” business gets some chances to “publicize (its) views,” and invited officials get a one-day conference on minority consumers.

The consumer movement today seems an equal mishmash. Consider CNBC’s three-hour consumer special the big week: an hour on “scams and rip-offs,” an hour on “wellness” (stress management and food safety), an hour on privacy (“the consumer issue of the 1990s”). CNBC forgot Earth Day, the “green consumer,” the liability crisis and leveraged buyouts.

Things sure have changed since Ralph Nader declared the Corvair “unsafe at any speed” in 1966 and ushered in the modern consumer movement. What’s not sure is whether the movement’s alive and well, expanding with strength into new areas, or whether it’s weaker, its purpose and energy dissipated.

Perhaps today’s movement isn’t so firmly tied to Nader’s Corvair or to the assumption that consumerism exists just to protect consumers from bad products and services. There were consumer movements before the turn of the century, against child labor, tainted meat, price-fixing.

By 1936, there was Consumer Reports, grown from an organization that tested products to provide an “information-based antidote to the excesses of advertising,” says executive director Rhoda Karpatkin, and thereafter a “virtual adjunct to consumption.” It also is dedicated to helping “maintain decent living standards,” understanding, says Karpatkin, “that all the product information in the world wouldn’t put bread on the table of a $10-a-week worker.”

But it was Nader, his Corvair study and his Raiders’ 1969 study of the Federal Trade Commission and that agency’s subsequent revitalization that started a decade of “protective legislation, federal and state, individual lawsuits and enormously increased consumer education,” says Andrea Ordin, California’s chief assistant attorney general. “Everyone had a consumer person as part of their civic plate.”

The legislation laid down helped keep the movement alive through the 1980s, but it “took about eight giant steps backward,” says attorney Phyllis Eliasberg, consumer specialist at WHDH-TV in Boston. While the new yuppies turned the other way, busy buying quality goods for high prices, the Reagan Administration got government off the backs of business, just as he ordered.

There was deregulation, non-regulation and cutbacks in all kinds of federal funding, and in funding of legal services and public interest law firms. The effort of consumer protectors, says Ordin, “was to hold the line. Business saw the time was right, and was going in to ask for a retrenchment (in legislation), and we were testifying at legislative hearings so rights were not taken away.”

Fortunately, says Karpatkin, “the vacuum at the regulatory agencies was filled by the state attorneys general.” Operating as a full national association, or a core group of 12 to 15, including California’s, the attorneys general formulate guidelines, then take appropriate legal action in their individual states--on airline advertising, car rentals, food health claims, price-fixing and other problems.

The Bush Administration is kinder and gentler, but fairly dormant. After all, says Bonnie Guiton, the President’s special adviser for consumer affairs, today’s consumer activists are “more willing to sit down and work with industry, and business is responding differently,” aware that “the concerns of consumers affect their bottom line.”

Guiton concentrates on privacy questions--a legitimate concern, but peripheral enough to annoy consumer activists if so many weren’t branching out themselves. Many are working on privacy, particularly data-sharing in government and industry. Many more are involved in “green consumer” issues--”the environmental impact of consuming certain products,” says Karpatkin, whose magazine now reports on which products cause the least damage in their manufacture, use or discard.

Some organizations--including Consumers Union--consider poverty “a national consumer issue,” says Karpatkin, although what they’ll do, besides lobby government for aid, is unclear. Hunger and homelessness are deservedly the compelling concern of all consumers, but not really “consumer issues,” and there are few ideas yet on how to approach the problems.

Somehow, says Richard Elbrecht, head of legal services for California’s Consumer Affairs Department, consumers “must sensitize the private sector to put out products and furnish services available at lower cost.”

It was easier to be direct when the consumer movement focused on scams and rip-offs, however obscured, and some fear the effects of taking off in so many directions. “Without the pressures of the consumer movement,” says Elbrecht, “consumer interests will have a lower priority.”

Others think that the many directions are proof of a movement that’s “stronger, with more organizations,” says Karpatkin, “greater sophistication in lobbying or raising funds. The idea has already been assimilated in the consciousness of American consumers that they’re entitled to rights, protections, good quality and service, to ethical behavior from corporations.” To some extent, they can take care of themselves.

And they do, to some extent. “Middle-class consumers have become more savvy,” says Eliasberg. “They comparison-shop; they recognize the red line through the ‘former price’ that was put there at the factory in Taiwan; they may even realize that breakfast cereals now cost more per pound than filet mignon. But they’ve given up: Where do they turn for help now?”