The Ultimate Consumer Choice – Just Say No

 

Consumer policymakers and commentators have been all too willing pay lip-service to the four basic consumer rights as proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1962. The right to safety, to be informed, to choose and to be heard are the central tenets of the consumer movement. Yet, few have sought to clarify or question what the rights mean and how they might be extended. When the United Nations added an additional four guidelines in 1985: the right to the satisfaction of basic needs, to redress, to education, and to a healthy environment, there was little, if any, debate about how competing consumer rights were to be balanced against each other.

The final right – the right to a healthy environment – was aimed at improving the environmental impact of production; to protect local communities, particularly in the developing world, from factory emissions and other pollutants. More recently advocates have promoted the idea of ‘sustainable consumption’: switching to ‘green power’, recycling and reducing packaging in an effort to reduce harm to the environment. However, there has not been a sustained effort to question the overall ideology of consumption and to reign in the excesses of unlimited choice. How is the ‘right to the satisfaction of basic needs’, for example, to be balanced with the ‘right to a healthy environment’? The pursuit of prosperity dependent on mass consumption is not based on ‘the satisfaction of basic needs’. Mass consumption has delivered benefits to a privileged few but has left much of the world’s population in poverty. The environmental costs of mass production and consumption have been horrendous. The ‘race to the bottom’ in an effort to serve consumer choice benefits very few – and it certainly does not serve the long-term interests of consumers regardless of where they live.

Whose interests does the pursuit of unlimited consumer choice serve (whose liberty is curbed by restricting the number of toothbrushes available in the local supermarket)? The consumer policy framework that predicates access and choice has proved to be ineffective at dealing with problems even when there has been willingness to do so. It is not so much that the framework is out dated but that policymakers have forgotten the historical foundations on which it was built. A system that is only interested in access and individual choice has little hope of spreading benefits widely and strengthening democracy.

It is not enough to offer consumers more choices in the form of alternative or sustainable consumption – these are too easily co-opted by marketers all too willing sell the alternatives. Policymakers must encourage consumers to also exercise the ultimate choice – the right to say no. Alongside self-sufficiency (intentional poverty) ‘Not Buying’ is a serious alternative to the culture of consumption.