World Consumer Day: What rights consumers have fought for

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Woman at the laptop (symbolic image): Compared to before, there are many possible comparisons

Photo:

Sebastian Gollnow/dpa

Friday was World Consumer Day.

A good opportunity to review what has changed positively for you and me as customers over the past decades.

Have you become a more confident customer?

Have you recently saved hundreds of euros on electricity, gas and insurance?

World Consumer Day goes back to a famous speech by US President John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy's goal at the time: consumption should be safe for customers, you as a customer should be properly informed, you should have the choice and, if there are problems with the offer and provider, you should have a chance to make your concerns heard.

The United Nations later established guidelines for consumer protection on this basis.

Have we made progress?

Oh well.

The agony of choice

When it comes to the election.

Today you can almost always choose and are even spoiled for choice.

And as a customer, you can now determine the provider or supplier in many more areas of life than was previously the case.

In Germany you can choose your electricity and often also your gas or heating oil provider.

You can choose the phone company, cell phone provider, and health insurance provider.

You can often save large amounts compared to before.

But you can also make a big mistake in your choice.

An example: When I was studying in Texas in the 1980s, I spent more money each month on my phone bill than I did on rent.

The conversations with my girlfriend at home in Berlin were vital and dear to me.

Today they would be almost free thanks to FaceTime or Skype.

I might now be throwing the money out the window on an overly expensive cell phone contract, an online connection and two streaming services.

The right to information

Information is central if we as consumers want to make sensible decisions and if we want to confidently face the providers who want to sell us something as the king of customers.

The most important information for us is often the price comparison.

These were often difficult to achieve in the past.

You would have had to visit the countless small retailers yourself to find the best price.

There have been attempts to solve this consumer problem for a long time.

In past centuries, there was a phenomenon in many cities where all the carpenters, all the tailors and all the plumbers had their shops on one street.

As we walked through the alley, the comparison took place almost in passing.

Some street names still remind us of this today.

Every modern weekend market still follows this logic, the comparison actually becomes less complicated, but problems remain, and not just with the price tags.

Because customers are not well informed about the value of the goods, they are often somewhat helpless when it comes to the pricing policies of suppliers.

Search engines make comparison easier

Since Kennedy's speech, price comparison has become considerably easier.

Price search engines on the Internet such asbilliger.de or Idealo allow a quick and systematic price comparison for everyday products.

You can now also compare the costs of insurance, banking services, electricity or gas relatively easily using relevant search engines.

Before the introduction of digital comparison portals, government regulations were necessary, but often not sufficient in the first step, and even more often due to a lack of control.

In the past, the legislature had to force banks to display the list of prices and services for their financial services, freely accessible in the branch.

If you asked different banks for a loan comparison in the last millennium, this made you less creditworthy for the other bank.

The mistaken assumption is that anyone who inquired at several banks needed it.

Even the Schufa score got worse when compared.

Today, the list of prices and services should be easily available on a bank's website.

Have a look!

How the interest rate for an installment loan must be calculated by the bank is now stipulated in detail.

Whether you get the loan at this price depends on your creditworthiness - and this is still assessed differently by banks.

The process is still not transparent for the customer.

Not to mention the phenomenon that, in addition to the actual financial product, customers are sold something else that they don't even need, such as residual debt insurance on the loan.

To prevent this, the legislature in Germany only recently took action.

So are the information options for consumers perfect?

By far not.

As a customer, despite the comparison portal, you often don't know how many providers are included in the comparisons, how the algorithms work and what flaw, keyword "sorting according to paid ads", is still hidden in the results.

The implicit duty to provide information

However, in order to ensure a consumer-friendly everyday life, you are forced to do information work.

And this in more and more areas of life.

When choosing your electricity provider as well as when choosing health insurance.

If you don't inform yourself, you'll quickly pay the higher price.

This compulsion to compare prices often goes so far that loyal existing customers who do not compare regularly end up paying excessive prices for their provider's acquisition of new customers.

The other side of the information coin: consumers who don't care, who don't educate themselves, are abused by many companies as milk cows of the system.

The providers get their profits from them and more.

Some marketing specialists called this AD customers, old and stupid.

There is no other option for you as a consumer. You have to inform yourself, you have to use the internet - or you will be systematically exploited.

Certainly in the information age

President Kennedy's first demand was that the products be safe for customers.

This is why we have the TÜV and the CE mark in this country.

The question of whether a product could be harmful to health has lost none of its relevance.

Think of the recalls of the Dutch cargo bikes from the manufacturer Babboe.

Or the valuable information from the Federal Environment Agency.

In the financial sector, the essential protective barrier you need is data protection - from protection against phishing to protecting your own data from the providers who hold your data.

Just on Thursday a hacker used clever manipulation to steal my credit card details.

My bank then warned me, at this point: thank you for that!

Many customers have no idea how much data companies have about us.

This is very easy to get.

As a customer, you have the right to find out, free of charge, which of your data is stored and what the companies use it for.

If you have any doubts about the level of protection, write to the data protection department of your respective service provider and ask them to send you the relevant information.

If you do this on Facebook, Instagram, X or LinkedIn, expect large data packets.

Right to Service

Kennedy wrote at the time that customers had the right to have their concerns discussed seriously.

In UN jargon, this becomes the mandate to "contribute to production and distribution structures that respond to the needs and wishes of consumers", for example to allow consumers to cancel transactions that have been forced on them (A/RES/70/186 general meeting).

You can find this right prominently in online businesses today.

There you have a 14-day right to cancel without having to give reasons.

The right of withdrawal arose from the right to defend oneself against columns of pushers at the front door, which is why it was originally called the right of withdrawal at the front door.

It should protect the customer from being taken by surprise.

The legislature has adapted this right for online purchases.

The reason is that the online buyer can only get a rudimentary impression of the product before purchasing and must be able to return a product that may not be suitable.

At times even at the provider's expense.

However, a number of online retailers have said goodbye to this service.

If you shop online, you should first check the terms and conditions (GTC) to see whether you would have to cover the costs in the event of a return.

And in the future

You see, a lot has happened for consumers since Kennedy's speech.

But still not everything is good.

Let me therefore formulate a wish for each of the four points that are important to consumers, which will advance us as customers in consumer protection and thus also the customer-friendly providers.

Selection:

For each product, providers should define who it is actually designed for.

And they should then only be allowed to sell the product to the right customers.

This is already mandatory for financial products in many cases, but this is not how it is practiced.

Information:

The “package insert” for a financial product, for example, should be a maximum of one page long and contain the really relevant details.

The CEO of an insurance company wouldn't read anything more about his product manager's suggestion.

Imagine having only one page of terms and conditions for every app on your phone - a dream!

Security:

If you establish EU-wide cookie rules for tracking customers, you should ensure that all providers comply with them.

And not just from the companies that feel committed to their customers.

Otherwise the customer will remain transparent to Google - and that is exactly what should be avoided.

Recourse:

If companies deceive their customers with business practices, they should be forced to distribute income generated in this way to customers who have not yet noticed that they have been deceived in a way.

Far too often, companies take home extra profits because they have deceived customers and the customers do not collect the money even after rulings by the highest courts.

When the Federal Court of Justice banned banks from collecting loan processing fees in 2014 and allowed customers to recover illegal fees, tens of thousands of customers did so (also with the help of Finanztip).

But hundreds of thousands gave up their money, saving the banks from having to repay billions, an insider told me at the time.

Customers suffer, but so does the more serious competition.

We as consumers wish each other much success until the coming World Consumer Day!