What Makes People Buy/the Popular Practice of Fraud/Partners in Plunder
by
[McGRAW Hill, $2.50]
by
[Longmans, Green, $-2,50]
by and
[Coviei-Friede, $2.,30]
THE consumer, we are told, thinks it is fun to be fooled. Witness the innumerable cases which are cited in the new books by T. Swann Harding and by Messrs. Matthews and Shalleross, as well as in such older books as 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, Skin Deep, Starring America, Your Master’s Voice, and Your Money’s Worth. It must he admitted, moreover, that some of the absurdest of the intentionally misleading advertisements in current: use are making the most money for their perpetrators.
Not only does the consumer think it is fun to be fooled, but evidently he thinks it is fun to be frightened. Witness the sales of what Mr. Harding calls the ‘hellfire, scare-the-consumer-out-of-his-wits books, He refers to such attacks by the Consumers’ Research group as 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, of which the latest is Partners in Plunder. After shuddering through these hooks, the susceptible consumer trembles at the thought of using any drugs whatsoever, or eating anything, or even reading anything — except, of course, Consumers’ Research publications, which alone are righteous and dependable.
But are they?
The Popular Practice of Fraud classes some of the Consumers’ Research books with the profit-seeking partners in plunder. Some reformers, says Mr. Harding, are convinced that because they are ‘liberal,’ or because they take upon themselves the task of defending the consumer, their technical equipment is adequate to discuss with bland pontificality questions that perplex authentic experts; and when their errors are exposed, their animus reveals a persecution complex.
Mr. Harding cites so many specific instances of gross Consumers’ Research errors, and so many more instances of misleading exaggerations, half truths, and innuendo, that the bewildered consumer exclaims, ’Well, what can I believe?
In Partners in Plunder, we read that the adult tick is very sly, for it has learned to crawl from a person’s foot to the hair at the back of his head, a favorite feeding place, without being felt. In business, according to the authors, such manoeuvres are called scientific marketing. In this vein Messrs. Matthews and Shallcross, themselves scorpions of no mean power, bite everybody in sight from foot to head and in between. Their favorite feeding place is wherever anyone in a profit economy is so antisocial as to try to do business at a profit. The present Administration in Washington, they declare, is completely under the control of those who work for profits against the interests of consumer-workers. (If so, Wall Street and Big Business seem to have overlooked it.) The Messianic complex which impels the authors to destroy the profit system all but destroys the value of their work as a guide to consumers.
Much more convincing is The Popular Practice of Fraud, because it is fairer to producers, advertisers, and government agencies, and because the author does not select his materials for the purpose of justifying his own political views.
The Consumers’ Research partners in thunder — bitter, sarcastic, sneering, smart, hot-tempered, cocksure— revel in rhetorical raillery. In the process they produce a work which cannot claim a place in Doctor Crother’ s ’Hundred Worst Books,’for it is never dull. In flashes it is brilliant.
Perhaps, as Mr. Harding says, this type of invective offers ‘precisely the kind of sensational and inaccurate indictment of everything and everybody that appears to be needed to whip the American public into action.’ what a pity that so many of the books which stick to facts with painstaking fairness bore us to death!
Messrs. Matthews and Shallcross never lose sight of their chief aim. It is not to help consumers in the world of to-day; it is to prove that in the consumer-workers’ society of to-morrow the quest for profit will be declared the major crime.
Not that such a society appears on the horizon. We are told, on the contrary, that a few thousand who constitute the wealthy ruling class have, through advertising arts and the domination of government, army, navy, press, pulpit, and schools, built up a technic of mass psychology control. This ruling class awaits now the opportune moment to apply this technic to the installation of an American Fascist government, reared on racial and religious prejudice, and preserved for the sole purpose of perpetuating the power of the idle rich.
‘What, then, can I believe? repeats the bewildered consumer.
It matters little what you believe, answers Donald A. Laird, of the Psychological Laboratory, Hamilton, New York. In What Makes People Buy, he says that 90 per cent of the things people buy they buy not because of beliefs but because of unconscious promptings. So Dr. Laird, basing his work on Freud, Jung, and Adler, tells salesmen how they can make people buy without knowing why they are buying. Very nice for the salesmen. Very nice, too, for the Schlink-Kallett-MatthewsShallcross crusaders, for it tends to prove their charge that even our business-school laboratories are more concerned with helping profit seekers than with helping consumers.
Well, what can a consumer believe? He cannot trust the salesmen with their psychoanalytic technic; or the advertisers with their paid testimonials; or the self-appointed protectors of the consumer with their propaganda for a new social order mixed with their ‘ scientific’ appraisal of the present order. Three fourths of the salesmen, advertisers, and consumer-defenders may be honest and dependable. But which three fourths? How is the consumer to tell?
What a boon to him would be an organization of the best consumer groups and the best producer groups, dominated by neither.
Such an organization could interpret the consumer to the producer and the producer to the consumer. It could promote measures, such as truth telling about installment selling rates, which are of equal benefit to honest sellers arid honest buyers. And there are many such measures, guinea-pig books to the contrary notwithstanding.
Perhaps the proposed Consumers’ Foundation will provide a partial answer to the consumer’s question, ‘ What can I believe? ’
WILLIAM TRUFANT FOSTER