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BY WARREN BOROSON
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
BOROSON ON MONEY
Among the most misleading statements ever made are:
"It's different this time" (said about a frothy stock market);
"The trend is your friend" (also said about the stock market – actually, I am convinced, the trend hates your guts); and
"You get what you pay for" (meaning, expensive is always better).
Among the virtues of Consumer Reports, the magazine, is that issue after issue it refutes the absurd notion that you always get what you pay for.
In just the current issue (June 2010), for instance, you will find that the magazine's readers rate Microtel Inn & Suites ($54-79 a night) as good as the Radisson ($89-130 a night). And that Consumer Reports' engineers rate the Oster BCBGO8 blender, at $40, slightly better than the Breville Ikon BBL600XL, which sells for $200. And the Toshiba Satellite T1350-S1324 laptop, at $600, is rated higher than the Dell Adamo A1-0508-PRL, at $1,330.
Anyone who buys anything – beyond, maybe, paper clips – should certainly check with CR first, to get not only the biggest bang for the buck but for high quality. CR looks at a product's effectiveness, cost, safety, convenience, repair record, and so forth. And it isn't swayed by reputation. In recent years, according to CR, Mercedes-Benz cars have been breaking down a lot. And Maytag washers have needed a lot of repairs.On May 18 I attended a CR subscribers' meeting at the DoubleTree Hotel in Fort Lee, where we listened to a talk by Neal P. Meyerberg, a lawyer, on using charitable gift annuities and such. His talk was funny and informative. The gift annuities, naturally, could leave money to Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports.
Magazine subscribers in attendance seemed as advanced in years as most of the geezers at classical-music concerts these days. Perhaps CR deliberately invited older people, figuring that they're the leading candidates to purchase annuities. (How a young kid like me got invited is a mystery.)
We learned from Robert Karpel, an engineer who is CR's program leader, that:
- The water that first comes out of the "hot" faucet is cold. So, let the water run a while, and become hot, before starting a dishwasher.
- You should throw away old Teflon-covered pots.
- CR spent $4.4 million in fiscal 2008 to purchase products for testing and rating – including 80 cars. (An older employee told me that CR once got products to test free of charge, but their quality, surprisingly, was inferior to that of products bought the usual way.)
- CR invents all sorts of strange gizmos to test products – for example, to test fabrics, a robotic clothes ironer to iron clothing exactly the same way.
- Products have to be challenged in exactly the same way, too. There's one employee whose job is to soil dishes in the same way, to test different dishwasher detergents. She uses eggs, chocolate, and such.
- Front-loading washing machines use less than one-sixth the water that top-loading machines use.
- In one case, a children's car seat was dangerous – and CR notified the manufacturer. The manufacturer replied that it couldn't afford to pay the postage to have all the seats returned. So CR paid the postage – and, for a while, its offices were crammed with defective car seats on their way back to the manufacturer.
- One subscriber wrote that a particular pot she had used caught fire and burned her dress, and the molten metal burrowed a hole in her kitchen's floor. CR tried but couldn't duplicate what had happened. Then someone suggested that the engineers use an old, coil-type stove. Thereupon the pot caught fire – and scorched a hole in the laboratory floor.
- The instructions that accompanied one pan warned: DO NOT KEEP A BIRD IN THE KITCHEN. Why not? CR found that the pan gave off low-level poisonous fumes.
- To check how cooperative manufacturers are at fixing things, CR damaged a variety of products – like air conditioners and vacuum cleaners. Then sent them to the manufacturers, explaining that the damage was the fault of the user. Yet every manufacturer replaced the products, or all the parts, free of charge. "It was fabulous," said Karpel. "And they didn't know that Consumer Reports was sending the products back."
- Can a special Glad plastic bag really hold a piano? CR checked it out.
In the interests of full disclosure, I must reveal that occasionally I have freelanced for CR; I must also reveal that CR, 30 or 40 years ago, turned me down for a job after I thought I had gotten an offer. (The estimable editor then, Paul Kellem, had offered me the job before announcing the opening to the staff, so I was eliminated from the running.)
Thus my biases, for and against, CR sort of even out.
Readers are invited to send financial questions to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
