Consumer Rights

The Right to be Informed

This right represents a basic economic interest of consumers. It has two principal components. The first is to safeguard the public against negative or harmful types of consumer information, while the second is to encourage the presence of positive or helpful types of consumer information.

Looking first at the safeguarding function, it is not always clear what distinguishes harmless information from harmful information. For example, an advertising claim for a particular product or service may be literally true but the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) may nonetheless find the information to be deceptive if it falsely implies that the claim holds only for the advertised product or service, and not for any others. Thus, while knowing what the advertising claim says is important, it is also important to know how the claim is interpreted by consumers.

Moving next to positive or helpful consumer information, relevance applies to three consumer activities (purchase, use, and disposal), but most attention has been given by far to purchase decisions. And here the concern is with making sure that consumers have available enough of the appropriate kinds of product or service information to enable them to make the buying decision that is right for them. Some common examples of information that has been mandated by government to facilitate consumer purchase decisions are simple annual interest on consumer loans, unit pricing on consumer products, and nutritional quality for foods and food products.

In attempting to satisfy the right of consumers to be informed, government is confronted with several practical problems. One is that much of the purchase information that consumers rely upon is provided by the businesses that sell products to them, and these businesses are sometimes more interested in providing persuasive information to consumers than in providing useful information. Another problem is that, practically speaking, there may be very limited opportunities for useful information to be presented in that literally thousands of consumer products are sold in packages that sit on store shelves, with little available package [Page 112]space to provide useful information to interested consumers.

The Right to Choose

Historians who consider this consumer right find themselves shifting back to the end of the 19th century when the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed to control the large corporations of that time, which often exercised monopoly control over the marketplace. At first, the government effort was concerned with protecting small companies from their larger and more economically powerful competitors, but later efforts focused more on fostering competition as a legitimate goal in its own right. This means making certain that there were sufficiently large numbers of companies in an industry to assure that competition can occur and, indeed, does occur.

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