In an age of media puffery and ungrounded opinion, corny old Consumer Reports is a rock of integrity.
I'm not a careful shopper. The last two times I've rented an apartment, I grabbed the first place I saw. I lugged home my current television, a brand no one's ever heard of, because I kind of liked the way it looked. I've never haggled over a used car, nor kicked any tires. In other words, I'm probably not your typical Consumer Reports reader. In fact, I've often felt that if Consumer Reports' editors knew how addicted this sloppy shopper was to their magazine, they'd not only cancel my subscription; they'd rush right over and affix a fat red sticker to my door that read: Sucker.
I've tended, in the past, to keep my fondness for Consumer Reports under my hat. For one thing, it's the butt-ugliest magazine alive, and an utter irony-free zone -- witness its boxy graphics, its unruly clash of primary colors, its photographs of shiny happy people that appear to be culled from 1960s Home Ec. films. For another, as the social critic Paul Fussell noted in his book "Class," a subscription to the magazine is a tell-tale totem of the anxious and insecure (and mostly liberal) middle class, folks who get unduly worried about the fish-to-mayonaise ratio in their store-bought tuna salad. (When my wife caught me scanning the May issue, she worried out loud that I'd become the kind of person who subscribes to the Tightwad Gazette and makes napkin rings out of the mouths of plastic milk jugs.) On the hipness scale, you're better off with a yellowed copy of Playboy, circa 1977, on your coffee table.
But while I rarely take Consumer Reports' earnest advice about, say, what kind of gas range to buy or what kind of popcorn pops up fluffiest, its regular arrival in my mailbox seems like a monthly cause for celebration -- and a kind of monthly journalistic miracle. In an era when the media seems increasingly shrill (everyone's a talking head, everyone's got an opinion), Consumer Reports lets facts speak for themselves. Investigative reporting on the wane? Not at a magazine where, according to a recent issue, they test mattresses by pummeling them with a "240-pound roller" up to 100,000 times. Celebrity-mania running amok? Not here, where the only recent bit of name-dropping occurred when testers clobbered the "Jane Fonda Walk-to-the-Music Treadmill," which scored dead last in the ratings and earned this typically dry, deadpan observation: "Monitor speed readouts inaccurate."
We're in the midst, if you haven't noticed, of a modest boom in writing that purports to decode and deconstruct American's push-me/pull-you relationships to consumer products. Both Sam Pratt, in his new Esquire column, "The Big Page," and Paul Lukas, in his new New York magazine column, "Inconspicuous Consumption," perform what academics like to call "close readings" of new and funky goods, teasing out the cultural meanings in, say, Pepperidge Farm's just-released (and redundantly-titled) "Toasting Bread."
But while both Pratt and Lukas have their moments, their coy, ironic, slightly precious tone makes you appreciate Consumer Reports' straightforward, come-as-you-are prose all the more. And when Consumer Reports' writers do get off a nice riff -- in a recent piece ranking Tortilla Chips, for instance, they neatly took the crunch out of the Louise's Stone-Ground Low-Fat variety, accusing them of tasting "soapy" and leaving behind a "residue like sawdust" -- you're reminded again that, alone with The Economist, it remains the last major magazine where pieces regularly appear without bylines. (Remember those relatively ego-free days, not too long ago, when The New Republic's TRB column and The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" essays went unsigned, or when The New Yorker put bylines at the end of pieces? As John Updike once scribbled in response to an editor of James Agee's, who had complained that Agee's genius was frittered away by writing "a quarter of a million unsigned words" for Time and Fortune magazines, "Surely a culture is enhanced, rather than disgraced, when men of talent and passion undertake anonymous and secondary tasks.") Every issue of Consumer Reports brims with the evidence of the careful performance of "anonymous and secondary" tasks.
I generally skip the magazine's much-acclaimed center-of-book pieces -- that is, its near-Herculian efforts to test major appliances and new cars. (Although I did admire the spanking it delivered to several Cadillac models in the recent New Car issue, rating them "poor" in "predicted reliability." Nothing like having old prejudices confirmed.) Instead, I read the magazine for its almost patriotic eagle-eye for low-level corporate mendacity. You and I might not read the fine print, but at Consumer Reports it's a kind of secular religion. In one recent issue, the editors picked up a package of something called "Konriko Brand Wild Pecan Rice" and then noted how, in the company president's "My Pledge to You" essay on the box, they discovered the following disclaimer: "Wild Pecan Rice is not 'Wild Rice,' and we have not added pecans." In another issue, they notice that the contents of a can of "Progresso Tipo Italiano" imported tomatoes -- with the slogan "Progresso makes it Italian" tattooed across the top -- are actually imported from Chile. In yet another issue, the editors take issue with the "Casio Depth Meter" watch, advertised for its ability to measure "up to six hours dive time at one-second intervals" and to show "depth in one-foot increments, up to 164 feet." The small print: "Not for scuba diving."
Lately, I've occasionally worried that Consumer Reports is showing a few signs of (uh-oh) attempted hipness. In February's music issue, the cover photograph showed a pile of CDs, and they weren't the Barbara Mandrel and Kenny G. albums you'd expect -- they were Beausoleil, Dylan and Nirvana recordings. Inside, however, the editors flailed away in fine old-fashioned form, noting that compact discs and recorded cassettes cost roughly the same to manufacture, and wondering why we pay so much more for the former. The piece concludes with the not-too-smug note that a Federal Trade Commission investigation of CD prices is "thought to be ongoing." Nothing better than a j'accuse that's followed up with a few subpoenas.
Happily, though, the sheer unleavened dorkiness of Consumer Reports always peeks through. A recent test of dishwashing liquids ranked them according to, among other criteria, "suds stability." Honey, do these suds look a little jumpy to you? And a large section on "Getting in Shape" offered an unintentionally hilarious chart that rated various kinds of exercise in terms of calories burned per hour. Near the bottom, after Table Tennis, came "Shopping" (155 calories burned per hour) with the added advice: "Best is to cover a lot of ground in a large store, a mall, or a shopping center, with little time spent in one place." Ready, set, go.
Its goofiness aside, you don't have to be Ben Franklin or James Fallows (or Ruth Shalit) to appreciate the fact that if more magazines shared Consumer Reports' bedrock ideals -- thoroughness, plainspokenness, incorruptibility, and an ability to cut through cant -- American journalism would be a better, livelier place. And what the hell, we'd all know a lot more about suds stability.
