The work of the Consumer organisation has evolved to meet its members’ changing needs, Dr Paul Smith, the body’s head of product testing told the club this week.
The work of the Consumer organisation has evolved to meet its members’ changing needs, Dr Paul Smith, the body’s head of product testing told the club this week.
The organisation began life over sixty years ago as the Consumers’ Institute and its focus then was mainly on product safety. “We’ve moved on,” said Paul, “and while we still do safety tests we are now striving to help our members make better informed choices about what they buy.” Paul said that membership surveys showed that 88 percent of members joined, “because I am buying something”, and were seeking advice and assurances about price, quality and value.
The vision of the organisation now was to “grow a marketplace of confident consumers whose collective influence was a force for good.”
These days Consumer was focussing on issue of most importance to their members. So, for example, with the cost of living, Consumer was often calling out the supermarket duopoly and members were responding by sending in examples of dodgy discounting and fake specials. He said customers had often reported instances of two for one deals where buying the two items separately was cheaper than the deal being offered. Paul noted that many consumers traded off price versus quality and would buy the lesser quality item because it was cheaper and therefore more affordable.
In housing Consumer had looked closely at contracts offered by retirement village operators and found them to be difficult to understand, one sided and containing unfair provisions. Likewise with climate change, Consumer was testing for product durability and was pushing to get a repairability label introduced for products so that the whole of life cost and ease or repair could be better assessed.