Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization

2 Cold War Shoppers

2 Cold War Shoppers Consumerism As State Project It is all too easy to dismiss the subscribers to the comparative testing magazines as the petty-minded penny-pinchers of commodity capitalism. It cannot be denied that a high proportion of Which?, Que Choisir, Test, and Consumer Reports readers have only been interested in their own material advantage. Value for money, for them, has related only to their own pockets and not to those of their fellow citizens. Yet, even acknowledging that many were only out for personal gain, they nevertheless showed themselves to be sympathetic to the campaigns of the leaders of consumer activism that have sought to reform the marketplace in ways that benefit everybody. If they wished to ensure that the goods that they had purchased did not break down, did not explode in their faces, and that redress could be sought, then they often required the intervention of regulatory authorities that would ensure the market could be made a fairer place for all. Moreover, these newly affluent shoppers were operating in a consumer society supposedly being built in their name. In the reconstruction of the war torn economies, if standards of living were to be increased for everybody and the society of the consumer was to be brought to all, then it also stood to reason that politicians had to respond by offering shoppers some protection in this unknown age of affluence. Economic growth might be achieved through macroeconomic policies promoting production, but citizens had to be certain they could operate effectively in their assumed roles as consumers. The regime of the producer and the planner had to exist alongside the new regime of the shopper. Yet this was not the case where consumer sovereignty was to be the model for avoiding the perils of unwise purchasing. If consumers were to behave with con- fidence, providing the impetus for economic growth and making all the improvements in technology and productivity worthwhile, then they required assistance and support. They needed to be assured that their spending would result in greater utility for themselves and their families. They needed to know that in borrowing heavily to purchase a car, a house and the furniture and appliances for it, they would not lose everything if the house was found to be shoddily built, if the car broke down on every trip, and if the appliances bought for the home harmed those who switched them on. As firms grew in size and complexity , increasing the distance between the consumer and producer, citizens needed to know that constraints and curbs would be placed on businessmen’s behavior, that capitalism would be kept in check and that, somehow, if not through the authority of choice but through the authority of government, the market would still serve the interests of those it claimed to represent. For all the emphasis on productivism, in both the U.S. economy and in Western Europe (through the Marshall Plan), governments around the world attempted to develop regimes of consumer protection to provide consumers with the confidence to enter and participate in the market. While states responded in different ways, what must be emphasized above all is that from the 1960s and especially in the 1970s states did respond: it is with good reason that many consumer activists look back on these decades as the time when they achieved many of their greatest successes. The growth in consumer protection measures was simply incredible, sweeping aside many of the rudimentary consumer representative systems developed during the 1930s and 1940s and replacing almost entirely the now seemingly rudimentary regulations enacted at the end of the nineteenth century. In Germany, there were only 25 new laws relating to consumer protection from 1945 to 1970, but an additional 338 were adopted by 1978. Similary in France, there were only 37 laws and ministerial decrees before 1970, a total that had grown to 94 by 1978.1 In Britain, major laws relating to consumer safety, hire purchase, resale price maintenance, and trade descriptions were passed in the 1960s, followed by wider regulations on fair trading, credit, and unsolicited goods and services in the first half of the 1970s.2 In the United States, a flurry of consumer protection laws was passed in the late 1960s relating to the automobile industry, drug safety, meat quality, package labeling, credit reporting, product safety, and a whole host of other trade practices.3 Certainly, organizations of comparative testers were not the only representatives of consumers during this period...