What Happened to Consumer Reports?

Y’know, I haven’t read a Consumer Reports in years. Occasionally I’ll look at Consumerist, a related website, but I do not pay to access Consumer’s Union product reviews online. A few days ago, The Atlantic commented on the apparent decline of the venerable magazine, noting that it hasn’t done well in the computer age. The Atlantic itself being in a bit of a decline (IMHO), the article wasn’t very deep, although its author, Paul Hiebert, did ruminate on a study that pointed out some rather obvious differences between CR’s involved, systematic, and highly comparative reviews with the off-the-cuff user reviews you see online and cited the public’s tendency to give undue credence to online reviewers.

More telling were the comments to the article, in which readers complained about CR’s political biases (and yea verily, many a review there is informed by one sort of political correctness or another), about the paywall blocking access to information that can be had for free elsewhere, about the drop in quality of CR‘s content… and in amongst those comments is a reply from one of the magazine’s former editors, pointing readers to two articles describing the dissatisfaction of the many former staffers and the disgust of a former reader.

To that I’d have to say “yup.” Consumer Reports lost me the time SDXB and I purchased the same model of high-end Hoover vacuum, enthusiastically high-rated in the magazine. At the time, he was living in a house a block from mine. He could get into the Base Exchange at Luke Air Force Base, and when he came home with his, I noted his delight with it. A week or two later I bought one for myself at Sears.

My standards for vacuum cleaners are high but not astronomical. I had a German shepherd and needed the thing to extract dog hair from Berber-style synthetic carpeting that was easy to clean. SDXB liked his house clean but was not what you’d call Suzie Homemaker (not if you wanted to live, anyway…).

I found myself not very pleased with the machine’s performance. It was sad compared with my old Hoover, which had died of old age. But I’d spent a lot of money on this top-rated machine, so I stuck with it.

A year or so later, within two or three days of each other, both machines dropped dead! It was altogether too clear that we were looking at planned obsolescence. He had figured out by then that the things left a lot to be desired (like, say, quality). I had never been nuts about mine but was amazed when both machines broke in identical ways. They were just shoddily made.

So are consumers crazy to put more faith in Amazon reviews than in the decrepit Consumer Reports?

I doubt it. Most of us know that a lot of 4- and 5-star reviews are written by shills. We all know that many of the 1-star reviews are actually complaints about delivery or customer service. As grown-ups, we can generally parse out a pretty clear view of the typical consumer experience by reading enough reviews and winnowing out the ones that don’t appear to be a) real and b) valid.

Many of Hiebert’s commenters enunciated what we said just a few weeks ago: they start with the 3-star reviews, then peruse the lower- and higher-rating reviews. With the most credible-looking of all these in mind, they form a kind of “big picture” of what consumer experience is likely to be for a given product. Scientific? No. As good as the OLD Consumer Reports‘ hands-on testing? Probably not. But just now it seems to be better than whatever else is out there.

Image:
Consumer Reports modification of Harvey Balls. By Stephen Schulte.