Consumer protection and a pleasing commercial culture

After a certain authority figure in a downtown store had been notified that the law required him to engage a furious customer who was demanding a refund since an electronic toy which the customer had bought from the shop a few days earlier had stopped working, he assumed a belligerent posture and proceeded to make the point that he could not consider either a refund or an exchange since it had been two days since the item had been bought.

He was corrected on that point too by a man who appeared to be a public official and who told him that proof of purchase was all that was needed to make a case for a refund or an exchange.

It is in situations like these that you come to realise how indifferent many people are to the law. For example, when the gentleman who appeared to be an official of sorts declared that the law allowed for a consumer to demand a refund on a bought item without providing any particularly good reason for changing his or her mind the small group of people inside the shop thought that he was seeking to make light of what was becoming a somewhat tense situation.

But he was right. The small and clearly under-resourced Consumer Protection office at Sophia had distributed information to that effect. In such circumstances you would have to pay a percentage of the cost of the item as a repackaging charge, though there was no such charge if the refund was being demanded on grounds that had to do with a defect in the item.

Over the years there has never been any really serious regard for consumer rights in Guyana, It has always been mostly about the customer taking his or her chances and where necessary being prepared to engage the offending store proprietor in order to secure an exchange or refund.

Even after a Consumer Affairs Unit was set up inside the Ministry of Trade it always seemed to dwell on the edge of the ministry; the paucity of its human and material resources attesting to the limits of both its authority and its effectiveness. It is the same with the facility at Sophia.

Entities like the Consumer Affairs Bureau are never really anywhere near having adequate resources with which to market themselves and their services effectively.

They depend on periodic bursts of uncreative and untargeted marketing utilising very forgettable strategies. The truth of the matter is that the procedures associated with securing redress through the Consumer Affairs office are often so ponderous and so dependent on the preparedness (or lack thereof) of store proprietors to cooperate that many consumers simply do not bother though that is not the sort of posture that you can afford to take if it could leave you out of pocket to the tune of the cost of a laptop computer.

There is more than good reason for both consumers and the Consumer Affairs Unit to get their acts together. It has to do with the proliferation of high priced mostly electronic goods and the simultaneous increase in imitations or fakes. Cheap imitations are a dime a dozen these days and as time goes by there are bound to be more consumer affairs issues arising.

In that context it is more than high time that the authorities come to grips with the fact that a reliable consumer protection regime is essential to a successful commercial culture.

As things stand these days the scales are heavily tipped in favour of the trader not because we have no laws to protect consumers but because we are unable – or perhaps unwilling – to enforce them.