User:CorpoBlight

Product quality - and manufacturer incentives

Aside from the problem of corporations abusing their customers after the sale, there are other problems such as terrible product quality. Often it's very difficult for the prospective customer to determine whether a product costs more because it will last longer, or whether it's simply padding the manufacturer's bottom line. One thing that could potentially help here is a mandatory "Product Facts" label, not unlike the label found on foods in the US.

Drawbacks

It's argued by some that increasing the information given to consumers can, in cases, actually be detrimental to those consumers. Consider, for example, the fallacious argument that "if you can't pronounce it, it's not healthy" when it comes to ingredients. By that logic, I could create a new name for an ingredient, and that would cause it to become healthy - or vice versa. The "information can be harmful" argument would thus be that showing the ingredients can be harmful since it may influence the consumer away from something perfectly harmless.

Perhaps this is a trivial concern, but it seems prudent to try to avoid giving manufacturers the opportunity to compete through deception.

I've heard this argument promoted (for medical products) by Dr Stephen Novella, long ago on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast. Of course, he explains it far more eloquently than I can.

Items for a "product facts" label

What sort of things could/should appear on such a label? Some data points may not make sense for some types/categories of product, such as consumables. Likewise, if a data point is too difficult for the manufacturer to determine or something they think is a trade secret, they'll make something up or sue to block the law.

Product quality / expected product lifetime

Before purchasing, I'd love to know how long my product should last (provided I take reasonably good care of it). But how do we turn this into a metric that isn't difficult for the manufacturer and that they can't deliberately distort?

Requiring them to state the product's expected lifetime (e.g. 5 years) could be difficult to compute and easy to distort. How do you prove that they knew material X would disintegrate rapidly?

Another measure that seems more reliable to me would be a statement about how an additional investment would affect the product's quality. If the following wording were required, the wiggle room seems limited:

An additional investment of 25%, prudently applied, would result in a product that lasted {number} times longer.

The "prudently applied" bit is load bearing: it applies to the manufacturing process (materials, manufacturing employees, QA, NRE, etc), not to things like executive compensation, stock dividends, advertising, or funding a high-pressure sales team.

If the number is high, this tells the consumer that it's a high-margin product and they get less product for their money, while if it's low it tells the consumer that most of their money is going towards the actual product. The hope is that consumers armed with this knowledge will be able to choose quality products, providing motivation for companies to produce higher quality / longer lasting products.

Wage inequality

This one is more about social ills and corporate greed than something directly impacting the customer's experience with the product.

Corporations like to say that they must pay their execs the way they do to retain them, because "everyone else is doing it". Would they continue to do so if it impacted their bottom line? Would the court of public opinion impact their bottom line if consumers could see the numbers at the time of purchase?