Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies

The consumer testing movement is concerned with the testing of branded goods and services to advise purchasers of their relative value for money. It began in the United States in 1927, when a civil servant for the Labor Bureau, Stuart Chase, and an engineer, F. J. Schlink, published Your Money's Worth, a [Page 326]critique of the exploitation of the consumer in the modern marketplace. This led to the establishment of Consumers' Research, which began publishing its Bulletin in 1929, though it was soon taken over in 1936 by Consumers Union (and its magazine, Consumer Reports) following a dispute over labor relations among Consumers' Research staff. Both organizations were a product of a burgeoning consumer culture, though one in which affluent—if nervous—shoppers sought more guidance in consumption. The scientific testing of commodities, together with the identification of “best buys,” offered a means by which consumers could maintain their distance from modern commercial values and sales techniques.

Following sustained economic growth in the post–World War II period, consumer testing took off across Europe too. In France, in 1951, the Union Fédéral des Consommateurs (UFC) was formed and began publishing its testing magazine, Que Choisir, in December 1961. In Germany, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Verbraucherverbände (Alliance of Consumer Associations) was established in 1953. In the same year, Consumentenbond began publishing Consumentengids in the Netherlands, and following its establishment in 1956, the United Kingdom's Consumers' Association launched Which? in 1957.

The privately owned testing bodies proved tremendously popular. By the end of the 1960s, sales of Consumer Reports approached 2 million, sales of Which? topped half a million, and Consumentengids was calculated to reach one in every ten Dutch households. Most impressive were the Scandinavian countries: although their consumer magazines were published by the state rather than private testing organizations, subscriptions ran into hundreds of thousands, such that Norway could claim the greatest number of sales relative to households in the world.

Many commentators have assumed that this form of consumer organizing was an essentially Western phenomenon. Indeed, some have suggested that rather than offering a critique of the capitalist marketplace, consumer testing agencies actually served to reinforce the tendency toward acquisitive individualism found within affluent societies. However, consumer testing constituted just one part of a wider movement of consumer activism that owed as much to the developing as the developed world. As early as 1956, the Indian Association of Consumers was created, predating many equivalent organizations in Europe, though the real takeoff came across Southeast Asia. Throughout the 1960s, consumer groups appeared across Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia, most prominently with the Consumers' Association of Penang in 1969.

In 1960, the Western consumer groups had come together to create the International Organization of Consumers Unions (IOCU, now Consumers International). By 1970, IOCU's membership consisted of consumer groups across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, if only into the richest nations of these areas. By 1990, however, IOCU could claim to be truly global and today is represented in over one hundred countries. Much of its expansion had been overseen by Anwar Fazal, a product of the Malaysian consumer movement and president of IOCU from 1978 to 1984, though other developing world activists have subsequently directed the global consumer movement from Indonesia, Brazil, and Kenya.

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