DougAlexander's Full Review: Consumer Reports Magazine
Being a consumer is the consummate American experience - the country that invented the Wal-Mart is obsessed with acquiring material goods at an alarming rate, all the while searching for the best values. Advice abounds, some from cheapskates who tell you to buy used shoes to the big spenders who believe that a car just isn't a car unless it's a BMW. Herein lies the heart of the consumer's problem - whom to trust when it comes to making that major purchase. Every source is biased on some way or another, right? It's common knowledge that they're all in the grip of advertisers or retailers or Big Tobacco (everyone's in the grip of Big Tobacco), right? Or maybe not...
Enter Consumer Reports, the magazine recommended most by aging, penny-pinching dads. This is one thing your father knows best about - CR is the number one source for the least-biased, most comprehensive product reviews. Notice I didn't say "unbiased," because when it comes to life, that term is a fallacy, but CR certainly goes a long way to avoid the nasty contamination of commercialism. They don't accept ads from any advertisers, and they don't allow their reviews to be used in any product advertisements, thereby freeing them from accusations of manufacturer bias. Sure, the writing may be stodgy and some product families given short shrift, but what you end up with is a powerful tool for consumers looking for the best values on the market today.
If You Buy It, They Rate It
CR reviews just about every product you could buy for your home - cars, food, computers, appliances, bikes, TVs, wine - you name it, the list could take up several pages. For each product they construct a complete series of tests, tailored to fit the product's intended use and to expose any common weaknesses in the product line. For example, the test might be as simple as seeing how fast an electronic air cleaner can clear a room of smoke, or how much dirt a vacuum cleaner can pick up off of a swatch of carpet. Usually the tests are taken on step further, too - testing vacuum cleaner emissions, for example, or how much noise the air cleaner emits in decibels. For features that are more subjective, such as washing machine usability or the taste of Special K Plus, they employ trained testers who sample and rate the products.
Armed with these standardized test results, CR then constructs a table that compares and ranks all of the brands tested in a product family. Each category, such as noise, usability, cost, etc., gets its own column, and CR provides extra notes at the end for miscellaneous items. Nothing flashy here - CR is not known for its humor or fascinating prose - but in the end it is a tremendous amount of test time and data distilled into a simple, easily understood table that is a snap to consult in the middle of the appliance shop.
Consult CR, but Get a Second Opinion
To be fair, CR does not rate all products as comprehensively as they should - the more complex ones, like cars and computers, tend to get a very high-level review, with none of the detail you'd find in a magazine devoted exclusively to cars or computers. I would never buy a car strictly on the advice of CR, but I would consult them for reliability reports, since their annual members survey collects reliability data from thousands of consumers, and presumably hundreds of different automobile brands. This aggregate data is then used to rate auto makers on repair history and reliability of their models, and the results are very illuminating. We bought our Geo Prizm partly because we knew from CR that it was a) really a Toyota Corolla underneath the Chevy logo, and b) Toyota Corolla's have an excellent reliability rating from Corolla owners around the country.
We've also bought a VCR and a TV based largely on CR's ratings, and we've been completely happy with both purchases. In one case we bought the last model of that particular VCR in the store, and the store manager, who was watching, commented that CR had been used several times by people buying VCRs, which was why our model was nearly gone. He then proceeded to access the ordering terminal and place an order for more, and I realized that I was witnessing a free market economy in action. Magazine rates product highly, consumer buys more product, stores order more product, manufacturer makes more money - that's it! That's exactly the system should work! My poor fiancee was left shaking her head and laughing at my naive excitement, but I ignored her as I patted myself on the back for being a good consumer. ("Good consumer, good consumer - want a milkbone?")
Consumer Reports vs. Epinions
I read one review in this category in which the author stated that Epinions was supplanting CR for his/her consumer information from now on. I disagree with this approach, because I think that CR is the professional complement to the service that Epinions provides. All of the reviews that we read and write on this site are purely subjective - they are the conclusions drawn from individual experience, without any standardization other than what is provided by the constraints of life. This has the potential to be very confusing, but it also provides the consumer with the entire range of viewpoints on any given product.
CR, on the other hand, has the same people performing the same tests over and over again on the same product families, thereby collecting data from the past and present product lines and giving as objective a review as possible. Combine the subjective Epinions with the objective Consumer Reports, and you've got yourself a more complete review. You can be sure that next time we purchase a major item like a stove, fridge, or stereo we'll be checking the pages of both Epinions and CR to get all of information possible.
A Wise Investment
For me, I'm keeping my subscription for Consumer Reports for as long as I'm a consumer - much like Quicken 2000, the money spent on this magazine repays itself many times over as you use the product. I'm sure that I've saved hundreds of dollars in bad purchases just by reading and digesting what this magazine has to say, and while it should never be your sole source of product information before you buy, it should definitely occupy the central spot.
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