Another Ladle of Product Stew
It’s hard enough to make a buck, without battling consumer resistance, consumer protection, maybe consumer eagerness. Ask the vendors of the products and services mentioned below.
Massachusetts’ attorney general tackled toothpaste marketing this month, making Procter & Gamble stop advertising that Crest provides cavity protection for children’s teeth “down to the root.”
As Atty. Gen. Scott Harshbarger pointed out, few children have roots exposed enough to get that protection, unlike older people, whose gums have receded. In fact, P&G;’s primary clinical proof of its claim was tests on senior citizens aged 54 to 93.
The result: P&G; changed its commercials, deleting root protection claims, will donate money to a state program benefiting students and--as these things always work--agreed never again to do what it won’t admit ever doing before.
Also this month, the FTC got an Arizona federal court judgment protecting us from false and misleading claims made by two connected companies marketing two unconnected products.
One was Amerdream Corp.’s Ultimate Solution Diet Program, whose Night Trim tablets had an ingredient promising significant reductions in weight, cholesterol levels and blood pressure. There were even a 100% money-back guarantee and a $1,000 savings bond just for trying a two-month supply. The other--Advanced Automotive Technologies (under the same president)--peddled the PetroMizer, a device to reduce auto emissions up to 100% while it boosted both horsepower and mileage.
These versatile but misguided marketers clearly missed the boat. They’d have done better to sell the PetroMizer as the Ultimate Solution. Dieters don’t want bonds or even money back, but they’d fight every lawmaker in the land for a 100% reduction of any kind.
In a new protective twist, San Francisco-based Consumer Action is criticizing “adult” 900 lines--not for delivering dirty stuff but for promising dirt and not delivering.
In the past, phone companies were criticized for carrying phone sex messages, billing for them and making the material available to children. Now adult 900 lines carry age warnings, cost disclosures and more innocuous fare, carriers are refusing to bill for sexually explicit calls, and much of the hard-core stuff goes over 800 lines, billed to credit cards.
But the ads for 900 lines haven’t changed, fraudulently “promising sexually explicit content that they no longer even attempt to deliver,” Consumer Action Director Ken McEldowney says. One ad in Hustler magazine, says Consumer Action, promised that “Wild wet party girls will do it with you” ($2.95 a minute), but the voice on the line “refused to discuss sex.” Another pictured topless women (“We will excite you beyond belief!”) but led to tape-recorded messages from women apparently just seeking dates.
“Despite highly suggestive titles and pictures of half-naked women in many ads,” said a Consumer Action report, “the services CA called provided tame, non-sexual conversation.”
Now that’s disgusting.
Some consumer protection goes too far. Take Morton International, a Chicago company that makes air-bag systems designed to save lives in car crashes, but which are sometimes themselves criticized as a health risk and potentially “toxic.”
No one denies the statistics on lives saved and injuries lessened when air bags inflate. But the process of inflation, which requires the instant generation of nitrogen gas, apparently releases smoke, powdery dust and a sulfurous odor in the car. None, says the company, is unsafe to breathe, even for asthmatics.
Heck, maybe air bags do have a downside. The company admits that it’s working on alternative gas “generants,” whether for health or aesthetic reasons. But the downside of air bags seems preferable to the downside of car crashes. Are you safer with fire or the foam of fire extinguishers?
Finally, Consumer Reports, a truly full-service protector, has investigated the quality, safety and identity of the fish sold today. And wouldn’t you know: Just when it’s all we had left to eat, fish too is suspect.
Apparently it comes to market polluted on the inside and covered on the outside with over 10 million colonies of bacteria per gram, including smatterings of “fecal coliforms.” It’s sold as fresh when it’s frozen, as fancy when it’s barely a food fish.
We shouldn’t eat it raw or buy it warm. We must avoid dried-out, gaping flesh, sunken, slime-covered eyes and sticky yellow-brown mucous, insisting on a smell like cucumbers, a translucent sheen and bright, clear, bulging eyes.
We’re grateful for such vigilance, but we’re down to fruit, nuts and popcorn these days, and I, for one, don’t care if they’re infested. Do I?
