CONSUMING INTEREST
Getting the Balance Right
By LESLIE ADRIAN Elsewhere in the book she points out that the manufacturer knows his product intimately (after all, he makes it, and he makes it to make a profit). The consumer cannot hope to approach within shouting distance of this inside informa- tion. In this technological age he is expected to trust the manufacturer to sell him value for money, after centuries of 'let the buyer beware.' Over a number of restricted areas the law affords him some slight protection and he also has avail-
able to him some rather expensive civil remedies.
The reissue of The Consumer, Society and the Law, in an expensive hardcover version (MacGibbon and Kee, 45s.), shows how limited these defences are in the face of the kind of frauds practised on innocent people every day. Searching Gordon Borrie's and Aubrey Dia- mond's pages for advice on counter-attacking the doorstep bookselling con. men, so thoroughly trounced in the May issue of the Consumer Council's Focus, .I found sections on 'innocent misrepresentations' and `negligent misrepresen- tation,' but not a word about deliberate mis- representation.
The criminal law applies apparently only to misleading descriptions made in writing. So the man who knocks on your door and tells lies in order to land you with an encyclopaedia that you would not have bought had you known you would later get a bill for £75 is not getting your money under false pretences, while the man who sold an evicted and impecunious family the entry to a non-existent flat in Southampton for a mere £5 is being sought by the police.
Comparison of cases suggests that the fraudu- lent company has a better chance of diddling the public than the individual working as a solitary confidence trickster. Why should this be? I have come across cases of door-to-door
trickery, such as collecting for non-existent charities, leading to the prosecution and punish- ment of the culpable individual. I have yet to hear of a company being publicly prosecuted for false pretences after its representatives had passed themselves off as market researchers or local authority officials for the purpose of selling educational books or fire-fighting appliances.
But this kind of fraud is open and honest com- pared to the subtle deceits of trompe-l'oeil packaging, misleading guarantees for mechani- cal and electrical appliances, chemical treatments of food and drink, and advertising claims that cannot be substantiated but, equally, cannot be suppressed.
Admittedly, it is extremely difficult to protect the consumer by simple legislation (or even complex lawmaking, which helps no one but lawyers usually). So the consumer advice and protection' that is commanding increasing sup- port in the industrial countries of the world looks as if it has become an indispensable com- ponent of modern living, until the public authorities decide to play a more active part.
The interesting thing about Miss Roberts's book is that, for the first time in consumer movement literature, she points out that the -whole idea of testing and criticising goods offered for sale originated in the description of the American National Bureau of Standards that appeared forty years ago in Stuart Chase and F. J. Schlink's Your Money's Worth. If government departments and services needed to inspect the goods they bought from manufacturers, why should the ordinary citizen not do the same? These public institutions, supported out of tax- 'payers' money, went to the trouble of choosing the best value for money. But why should the information that they painstakingly compiled be kept a secret? If the government could save 30 per cent of its income by rational buying, why -shouldn't the taxpayers do the same? The ex- amples of savings sought by a rich government listed on pages 21 and 22 of 'Consumers are quite enough to set the most hardened sceptic thinking out the answer. Unless, of course, he's .already engrossed in making a killing out of selling dud hearing aids to incurably deaf but hopeful readers of the small ads.
Previous page
