Of course, under any given regime of work time and income, it seems reasonable that households would use information from product tests to direct spending so as to generate as much utility as possible. But seeing product testing as just a reasonable guide to rational consumer decision-making, under the particular regime of consumption and work-time that developed in the mid-twentieth century, takes the institution of product testing, and all that it represents, to be exogenous to that regime. However, the institution of product testing was not independent of that regime, but, rather, reflected an attitude toward commodities that to some degree explains its emergence. This is because product testing emphasized the physical properties of consumer objects and did so in a quasi-scientific and quantitative manner. The fit between a given product and the conditions of life within which the product would typically get used, was not a matter that was given much consideration by consumer product testing organizations such as CU. The rapid growth of product testing then indicates that increasing importance was attached to specifying and measuring the potential utility inhering in the physical properties of commodities—which in turn indicates the growing influence of a narrow and hypothetical conception of use value, in light of which a money wage became more easily imaginable as commensurable with the labor given in exchange for it. In this sense, product testing has a significance similar to the developments described in the previous chapter—the rise of branded consumer goods, commercial warranties, and the emergence of the implied warranty. The efect of these developments was to stabilize and standardize the use value of wage goods while encouraging a tendency to think about matters of utility and usefulness in terms of the properties of objects rather than situated practices.
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Time for Things