Whoops, sorry, all good ehy?
I’m getting sick of hearing of companies that are deliberately misleading consumers, sometimes to dangerous results, and getting away with it. When a company is caught, they issue an immediate appology, and move on, all is forgiven. The government agencies responsible for protecting consumers issue a press release, and consider the matter closed. “We caught them, they’re sorry they lied to all of you lot, and they promise not to do it again”. Its getting tiresome.
The latest is the Sunscreen debacle. Numerous companies have been advertising their products as having “all day protection”, stating that one application will protect you from sun burn and skin cancer for the entire day. Consumers have, until now, been left to discover the hard way that that is very very wrong.
Even the Commerce Comission itself said that this was unacceptable:
Commission chairwoman Paula Rebstock said “Consumers should not have to find out the hard way, through sunburn and skin damage, that a sunscreen doesn’t provide the protection claimed. The onus is on manufacturers and distributors to ensure the claims made on their products about SPF are accurate.”
But the commerce commission congratulated them on being caught
Commission chairwoman Paula Rebstock said she was very pleased the companies had responded in a responsible manner.
Consider the consequence of what these companies have done: They have lied to consumers, knowingly and willfully, and caused an untold and impossible to calculate number of sunburns, which as we all know from the recent advertising campaign, leads to skin cancer later in life.
March 7th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Well hey if the Government can’t be help accountable for what they say and do (and retroactively change laws just incase they might be) how can you expect a company to be?
In the US this would create a class action lawsuit accounting for anyone who could prove damages (or just burn themselves for the fun of it) caused by the mis-information and the company would get “burned”.
But in typical NZ’er fashion we’ll moan a little bit, they’ll say sorry, we’ll say “aww look they’re sorry… how cute” , then forget about it. As a country we’ve become too nice and just go with whatever crap people throw at us. Regardless of the cost to the country too (don’t get me started on kyoto, the nz dollar NOT being over inflated hence rate changes from last year not working, or really anything else)
I’ll bet you didn’t even remember the above law change until I mentioned it.
March 7th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Oh, I do remember it. The only thing that keeps me from emigrating is that other countries are more insane.
March 10th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
True, probably the only thing worse than being a home owner at the moment is being an exporter. Or maybe a home owning exporter…. When will this government go away like the nice surplus we had….
However if I was living in the United (policed) States I’m sure I’d be having lots of fun too; to your point they’ve gone mad. The UK possibly seems a little less mad to me so long as I stay far away from London. I can work there too. Infact it’s suprising how many countries I can legally work in with a minimum of effort.
Aussie’s cheaper to get to, but I dunno… If you’re going to run away from home you should really go further than your cousin’s house down the road.