GINNY LUI SITS UNDER A 100-WATT light bulb, studying spoons. The spoons have gone through eight full cycles in one or another of a battery of 20 dishwashers; Lui's task is to examine each one for telltale signs of dirt. If she detects a speck, she must then decide just what sort of speck she has spotted. Is it gritty? Is it "medium soil" or "heavy soil"? When she runs through all the spoons, Lui turns to plates and cups and knives and glasses that have been emptied from the dishwashers, making the same inspections and rendering the same hairsplitting verdicts. She guesses she has made 30,000 such judgments in the past eight weeks.
Appearances to the contrary, Lui is not some hapless soul condemned to a lower circle of Dante's Inferno. She has been happily doing such work for eight years as one of the 95 product testers for Consumer Reports, the monthly magazine that has served as an indispensable guide for millions of shoppers since 1936. And a major reason for CR's success is the rigorous, painstaking, maybe obsessive and some might even say nutty striving for objectivity that Ginny Lui and her colleagues bring to the testing of products.
By most measures, CR is thriving as never before. Between 1990 and 1993, its monthly circulation ballooned from 3.8 million to 5 million. Although that figure has remained flat since then, CR estimates its total readership, including pass-along and library copies, at 19 million. Consumers Union, the magazine's parent organization, operates on an annual budget of $133 million, most of which is raised through subscriptions and book sales. And in 1990, aware that its devoted audience was getting older (median age: 42), CR revitalized another magazine devoted to young people into Zillions: Consumer Reports for Kids, which comes out six times a year and reaches 280,000 home subscribers plus numerous school programs. Its topics ("Which Ice Cream?" and "Fast Food: What's Good?") are keyed to young consumers who may, somewhere down the line, want guidance in buying a new car. CR has even gone electronic: it is now available on several commercial online services and produces its own syndicated television programming, which is currently carried by about 50 local stations.
As an independent ombudsman for the American buying public, CR has always attracted some ire and resentment-and not only from manufacturers. In 1939 a House committee branded Consumers Union subversive, thanks to the magazine's perceived antibusiness bias. Though such witch-hunting may seem laughable now, executives at CR and Consumers Union are not smiling at what some detractors and publishing analysts are saying about the magazine today: 1) its methods of testing and evaluating products are sometimes flawed and less objective than they appear; 2) the magazine has evolved from a neutral reporter into an advocate of politically correct but scientifically dubious environmental causes; and 3) as a general-interest publication, CR can no longer keep up with the flood of new products and hence cannot compete with the growing number of specialty magazines that rate, say, computers and the tidal wave of new software.