As suggested, to some extent this change in the kind of objects tested can be explained by changes in the consumer product mix. As real incomes increased, which they did steadily in the postwar period, the market for consumer durables expanded, and so durables became more prominent in household purchasing decisions. Since consumer durables are typically expensive, and tend to be complex artifacts, expert advice and test results would be comparatively more important for purchasing decisions about them.23 There were also organizational factors involved in the predominance of cheap goods over durables in testing by CU in the 1930s. In its early years, Consumers Union and Consumers’ Research operated on shoe-string budgets, and so could not aford to buy many consumer durables to test. These explanations go some way toward accounting for the diference between the kinds of products tested pre- and postwar in Consumer Reports. At the same time, the increasing preoccupation, in the postwar period, with scientifically interrogating durable goods in order to disclose their useful powers (or lack thereof), is consistent with the theory that mass consumption was driven by wage-labor commensuration. For if wages are fairly exchanged by virtue of the use power contained in wage goods, then getting clear about just how much use power they contain becomes very important. Durable goods, construed as repositories of potential free activity, are uniquely able to make the wage commensurable with the labor given in exchange for it. This means that it is particularly important for worker / consumers to gain information about them—which would explain the increasing prevalence of durable products in consumer testing.
Another change in CR testing over the course of its history is in the size and content of the guide to how tests should be interpreted and used. In 1947, the “how to” section took up six pages and included a guide to shopping judiciously, as well as a statement about the objectivity of the testing procedures. By 1987 that section had been cut to just three pages, containing a description of the layout of the book, an account of the reasoning underlying the decisions made by the organization about what items to test, a note on how to interpret symbols used in product assessment, and a statement about the objectivity of the organization. The shrinking size of the guide section, which in the 1930s and 1940s had included advice about how to get the best price for a given good, indicates a change in focus from the practice of shopping, with the emphasis on promoting prudence in the marketplace, to the characteristics of the goods themselves.
Product Testing and Product Regularization
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