Systematic third-party consumer product testing by nongovernment organizations first emerged in the United States in the 1930s, with testing laboratories set up by Consumers’ Research and its rival, Consumers Union (CU). Over the following decades consumer testing became widespread, with results reported in the publications of consumer organizations, in periodicals devoted to particular products or hobbies and in mainstream newspapers and magazines. Even as early as 1955, 5 to 10 percent of America’s purchasing units, according to one estimate, were directly influenced by recommendations made by CU’s publication, Consumer Reports (CR) (N. D. Katz 1977; Sargent 1958). This figure probably greatly underestimates the extent of the influence of product testing, as test results informed the reputation of products and brands even for consumers with no direct knowledge of the results.
In the postwar period, business began to take increasing note of the activity of consumer testing organizations, especially Consumers Union. According to Jean Whitehall, managing editor at CU, this was because businesses realized that “adjustments of a product based on CU comments were beneficial to sales” (N. D. Katz 1977, p. 314). Manufacturers also began to refer to Consumer Reports test results in their marketing campaigns. The change in attitude of business to CR was in response to the broader dissemination of consumer consciousness in the postwar era, as the ideas and concerns of the consumer movement became more mainstream. Historians have noted that in the postwar period, workers were supportive of the consumer movement, seeing the campaign to secure quality in consumer goods as a natural extension of labor’s postwar objective of increasing real income (Creighton 1976; L. Cohen 2003). Consumer product testing quickly became a common practice, spreading well beyond consumer advocacy organizations and government labs into all corners of the public sphere.
Given how widespread product testing has become, there is a surprising paucity of scholarship about the subject. The research that has been done has approached the topic from the angle of production. In the literature, consumer product testing is broadly portrayed as an expression and extension of the rationalizing principles developed in early twentieth-century mass production, associated with Taylorism (N. D. Katz 1977; Noble 1977; Silbur 1983; L. Cohen 2003; Glickman 2009). On this understanding, consumer product testing, like much else in capitalist modernity, reflects an unending quest for ever more optimized technique. Testing was just one more manifestation of rationalization, subsumed under the broader drive for eficiency, where ultimately eficiency is thought about from the point of view of the economy as a whole—eficient production and eficient consumption working together to minimize the aggregate waste generated by the economy.
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Time for Things