Consumers deserve the protection of a tough, vigilant agency
That’s how it was in the ‘80s. Back then, if a programme like the Gay Byrne Hour lambasted a supermarket chain, shoppers took their business elsewhere so readily that some of the chains which coincidentally disappeared, notably 5 Star, regarded the programme as one of the key reasons for their demise.
The power of one programme at that time was scary. I know, because I did the Dublin research for the shopping basket item and wrote the script based on research conducted by a band of brilliant women around the country. It was the first and only time in my life when, if I said (in a script) “jump!” large businesses competed to say “how high?”
Although we normally priced the solid staples of daily living, every now and then we’d take a vagary, like comparing the prices of passion fruit.
On that occasion, the presenter muttered that he’d never tasted a passion fruit. Two hours later, a crate arrived from Superquinn. (The producer, one Adavin O’Driscoll, a formidable ethicist, sent the crate right back with a note saying Gay Byrne could afford to buy his own. Those of us who’d looked forward to sharing the freebie were filled with admiration and hatred of her high principles.) At Hallowe’en, one of the chains, guessing that the programme would compare the prices of barmbracks, took the step of not pricing their bracks at all, presumably in the belief that we’d skip them. We couldn’t skip them, so I went in search of a manager, clutching one of the bracks.
“Could you tell me what price this is?” I asked him.
He quickly decided I was the spy shopper.
“To YOU, 20p,” he responded, pleadingly.
It gave nobody any pleasure to put individual shop managers under such pressure, but it was a powerfully effective aspect of public service broadcasting. Consumers at that time made notes and chose to do their Friday shopping in one supermarket or another based on what the programme had said.
When we talk about monopolies being bad for competition, it’s worth remembering that the time when that particular programme was of most obvious benefit to competition, in every townland in this country, was when RTÉ 1 had a virtual monopoly on the airwaves.
Once local radio took off, that changed. Local radio stations might, and some of them commendably do, stand braced to attack local authorities and health services whenever they fail to deliver on their function, but, of necessity, they tend to have a much less bared-teeth approach to local advertisers. Hence, while the proliferation of local radio stations over the last 20 years has undoubtedly offered more LISTENING choice, it has also fragmented the totality of a listenership which could be activated on consumer issues by one programme - and has not replaced the consumer activism of that programme at local level.
Big companies still demonstrate some sensitivity to media, as evidenced not so long ago when this column criticised one service supplier, which promptly withdrew advertising from the newspaper to teach us manners. But that level of touchiness is rare. Most companies under attack rely on consumer inertia to help them past any transient negative coverage.
Active consumerism died at the beginning of the ‘90s and the fragmentation of the mass media audience is only one of the reasons. More money is another. The rising tide may not lift all boats, but it sure as hell makes the people in the lifted boats pay less attention to their small change.
The generation of middle class Ireland that’s buying properties in Turkey, Marbella and Orlando is not sitting around over cups of old fashioned instant coffee and comparing the price of rib roast in Tesco with the price in Dunnes Stores. That’s SO last century.
It’s much the same with drink. Those going out for a night know damn well that Pub A charges much more for a pint than Pub B, but they’re not going to sacrifice the atmosphere, the in-crowd and the convenience of Pub A to save a handful of euro.
IN MANY consumer choices today, time is more important than money. Let’s say you have the choice of going to the cathedral-sized Tesco on your way home from work, or going to the convenience store attached to the local petrol station. You know that the prices on individual items are going to be lower in the Tesco. But you also know parking is going to take longer and that the sheer size of the shop is going to slow you down and persuade you to buy more than you actually want. So paying more per individual item at the convenience store begins to look, in a peculiar way, like a bargain.
Of course, if you don’t have a car, your choices are reduced to somewhere between few and none anyway. God be with the days when we could all shop around because even the poorest of us could pull together the few hundred necessary to buy a banger, a starter-car. The State abolished the starter-car when it introduced the NCT. If you’re poor, you walk.
Drive past one shopping centre on the northside of Dublin any day of the week and you’ll see women pushing baby buggies panniered on all sides with shopping baskets or wearily shifting bags from one hand to the other.
What’s interesting about the bags is that they’re always from ONE of the two big supermarkets in the centre. Never from both. If you’re forced to walk a fair distance to a supermarket in grey, cold weather, and walk home weighed down with groceries, it’s difficult to sum up the energy to buy Weetabix in one supermarket and detergent in another because of the few cents to be saved by such comparison-shopping.
At the other end of the wealth scale, comparison shopping is just as unlikely, but for radically different reasons, including the tendency to buy complete meals from stand-alone luxury shops. Such emporia, scattered throughout the suburbs of our big cities, offer tinfoil containers of ready-to-cook meals which obviate peeling, chopping and mixing while filling the house with the wonderful aroma of freshly cooked food.
Such stores cater to a new reality in the homes of well-to-do 20-somethings: their kitchens all have big stainless steel fridges which are empty except for milk, butter and the odd egg. If you’re one of them and can afford gourmet meals to go, you tend to choose on taste and convenience, rather than noting down the price of tiger prawns with lemongrass and fusilli, and running around the corner to see if Gourmet Meals to Go has the same dish cheaper than The Butler’s Pantry.
The preoccupied, distracted and harried pattern of Irish life means that, as consumers, we need the protection of a tough agency.
If that agency turned its attention to the rising tide of rudeness, so much the better.
Because civility counts too. And - currently - it’s in short supply.
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