Business: THE U.S.'s TOUGHEST CUSTOMER

(6 of 11)

simply supplement. Some retailers who mail out unsolicited credit cards try passing on the high costs of collection and theft loss to their customers. Until protests from three states prompted revisions in the plan, Montgomery Ward billed charge-account customers for credit life insurance on themselves to avoid the expense of settling with the estates of deceased buyers. Unless customers specifically requested not to be enrolled in the plan, they were billed 100 a month on each $100 owed. Although the charge amounted to pocket change for most persons, it was designed to pass on a major expense of Montgomery Ward's to the customers.

> SLOPPY SERVICE. Consumers Union, a nonprofit, private testing organization of which Nader is a board member, distributed 20 deliberately broken TV sets to New York City homes and asked neighborhood repairmen to fix them: only three of the 20 were properly serviced. Television, air-conditioner and many other repairmen commonly refuse even to look at a cantankerous appliance until they collect a substantial "estimate fee." Texas authorities have forced finance companies to return $1,900,000 to victims of unscrupulous and outrageously sloppy home-improvement firms. Automobile repairing has broken down so badly that automakers have instituted training programs for mechanics, and are developing new gadgetry for electronic diagnosis of engine troubles.

> UNSAFE OR IMPURE PRODUCTS. Consumers can get information about the nutritive value and ingredients of dog food more easily than about some forms of canned meat; the chairman of the Senate Consumer Subcommittee, Utah's Frank Moss, likes to point out this discrepancy by reading the can labels to his audiences. When Consumers Union analyzed federally inspected pork sausage, inspectors found that one-eighth of the samples contained "insect fragments, insect larvae, rodent hairs and other kinds of filth." Investigators for the National Commission on Product Safety have found many potentially lethal toys on the market. Eleven Philadelphia children recently had to have tiny toy darts, which they accidentally inhaled from a plastic blowgun, removed from their lungs. Other hazards include a child's electric stove that produced temperatures of 600° and a baby's rattle that was held together with spikelike wires. Under a law signed last month, the Government can ban the sale of toys that present electrical, mechanical or heat hazards. But the law does not become effective until after the Christmas buying season, and Congress disregarded a commission recommendation that the Department of Health, Education and Welfare pretest some kinds of toys for safety. By the estimate of the Product Safety Commission, about 100,000 persons each year are injured when they walk through safety glass; yet builders have repeatedly refused to make it stand out better by marking it clearly. Nader has charged over nationwide TV that complex electronic medical equipment causes large numbers of unreported electrocutions in hospitals; doctors have estimated, he said, that anywhere from 1,200 to 12,000 patients per year are electrocuted. Official safety regulations, where they do exist, are often loosely enforced. Last month the Department of Transportation announced that one-quarter of the tires that it has tested this year failed to meet a significant test: standards originally devised by