Mrs. James D. Anderson, wife of an Episcopal clergyman and mother of three small children, said she was "quite surprised" to discover that she did not save money on all of the large "economy-sized" packages.

"And all these years," she lamented with a smile, "I'd been lugging those heavy things home."

Mrs. Anderson, between bursts of gibberish from her plump and smiling son, Kent, ensconced in the kiddie seat of her shopping cart, was asked whether unit pricing in the store had saved her any money.

"Oh, Lord, I don't know," she replied. "But I've been impressed, I really have. I'm not sure I've saved any money. I just appreciate the honesty of it."

The pricing experiment got under way Dec. 8 at the Alexandria store, which serves a predominantly white upper middle class clientele. It has been under way since Sept. 29 at a store in the predominantly Negro inner city of Washington.

MECHANICAL CALCULATORS TESTED

In two other stores, one in the inner city and one in another virtually allwhite Alexandria residential section, Safeway is simultaneously testing the use of mechanical calculators that will quickly translate the price of an item into the price per ounce.

Interviews at the Washington store where unit prices are posted tended to bear out an estimate by the manager, Norman Creel, that fewer than 10 per cent of his customers were paying any attention to the listings.

"The people are getting no good out of it, so it's no good as far as I can see," Mr. Creel remarked. "It's also a lot of work for us, keeping the right goods behind the right tags."

Thomas Prati, manager of the other Washington store, estimated that only 1 per cent of his customers were using the calculators, which are chained to shopping carts.

Allie Ponton, manager of the Alexandria store that posts unit prices, estimated that 25 per cent of the shoppers there "probably like it" while "the other 75 per cent don't give a darn. Maybe I shouldn't say that. I mean the other 75 per cent just don't pay any attention to it."

However, Miss Rebecca Vasil, a monitor of the experiment at Mr. Ponton's store, reported that 46 of 49 customers interviewed one day were interested.

PROJECT SUPPORTED

"Eight asked where they should write Safeway," she said, "since they thought it was a project important and useful enough to them that it should be continued in that store and spread to other stores."

Miss Gail Lucas, a monitor at the other Alexandria store, reported that four of every five customers she had talked to were "ready, willing and capable" to use the mechanical price calculators there Stanley Osborne, the store manager, reported "great interest" and "a substantial number of users but declined to make a precise estimate."

Ten monitors, young women called hostesses, worked in the four stores until the end of December under the supervision of Miss Jacqueline L. Brown, a home economist on the Safeway company's staff. They explained unit pricing to customers, showed them how to use the calculators and tried to encourage them to compare prices.

Blacks worked as monitors in Washington and whites in Alexandria. Their reports to Miss Brown indicated widespread acceptance of both unit pricing and the use of calculators in the Alexandria stores and much apathy, though not as much as the managers reported, in the Washington stores.

The Washington monitors tried in their reports to cast some light on the reason for disinterest among inner-city residents.

"Some customers feel the unit pricing wouldn't do them any justice, because it would make them spend more money," Mrs. Sarah Harrison reported. "They feel it's just another supermarket gimmick."

SOME 'DOWN IN THE DUMPS'

"Some underprivileged consumers feel disgust, and are generally down in the dumps," she added. "They don't feel a need to help themselves or teach their young

to shop for food, but they feel that since they are on welfare they will be fed anyway. As some say, 'Why should I try to save money for the Government.'"

Mrs. Minnie R. Bell observed in her report that some customers "feel that only the people that have money can save and will benefit from this method, because the ones that have the money can afford to buy the largest sizes."

"During the first and second week the people seemed interested," according to Miss Agnes Dewitt, a monitor in the Washington store where calculators were tested. "But as the days passed their interest dwindled away. They were either in a hurry or they did not have the time."

"I remember one lady telling me that she did not need a computer," Miss Dewitt went on. "She said that the bigger size is always the best buy. Then another lady told me she had been shopping before I was born. So, therefore, she knew how to shop."

Mrs. Willa Hicks, who worked in both Washington stores, attributed the apathy to "inability to comprehend even rudimentary basics." She reported, however, that some customers registered "sheer enthusiasm over the discovery that a new device enables one to realize monetary savings."

Like other inner-city monitors, she found that "the most comprehending group appears to be college students." Students at nearby Howard University were frequently observed comparing unit prices at the store where they are posted.

Senator HART. Our next witness is the President of the Louisiana Consumers League, Dr. Lee Richardson. Dr. Richardson is professor of Management and Marketing at LSU. We are delighted to have an opportunity to have his judgment.

Incidentally, I make reference to things being printed in the record and for the benefit of the record and so on. The record of this hearing will be printed in due course and participants in the assembly will each receive a copy of the record.

Professor?

STATEMENT OF DR. LEE RICHARDSON, PRESIDENT, LOUISIANA CONSUMERS LEAGUE, AND PROFESSOR OF MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING, LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY

Dr. RICHARDSON. Thank you, Senator. It is an honor to appear before the Committee and before a Senator who is reknown as a consumer advocate.

We, of course, want to limit our remarks to packaging and I want to first offer what I might call a bit of philosophy concerning the regulation of things that affect the consumer. For example, I think the traditional view of the consumer marketplace can date back to the Eighteenth Century.

We have this feeling that there is an economic man out there perfectly informed who is buying products from suppliers who give him or her perfect information concerning these products. Thus, with his perfect intelligence or her perfect intelligence, ideal solutions are made to consumer problems.

We have developed a business system primarily on this premise and we view, it seems, in our legislation the businessman's view of the situation is that we do have indeed a very intelligent consumer out there, that this consumer is a sovereign individual just as a voter is and can make perfectly good decisions.

Certainly there are cases of businesses making real mistakes in trying to convince the consumer of something that was obviously not desirable.

Then we have another view. This is a nice idealistic view and this is a view of what the consumers really out there are doing. We have never really gone to the consumer, done research, if you please, or just simply asked the consumer what is your situation here.

Now it seems to me we have to take a look at what the consumer faces and build our legislation up from this premise rather than taking the view that the system is necessarily the best and all we have to do is occasionally patch it up to prevent the freak and the fraud situation that may come along.

I would like to offer one concept of this approach to the consumer that I think is quite relevant to packaging. We have to recognize that packaging is just part of a communication process. The consumer isn't going out there looking at packages and making all of her or his decisions. The consumer is using lots of different kinds of information. It is a complete problem of communication and getting information not just a packaging problem.

I would like to give some illustrations today on just what I mean by this. Our legislation is going to have to reflect the fact that the consumer must receive a consistent and fair and useful amount of information. Packaging could be created in the most ideal sense from a consumer's point of view. We can have laws that regulate packaging in an ideal sense from what I might call a consumer's point of view and yet we could still have basically the same problems we started out with because there are alternative information sources, to use a businessman's point of view, there are alternative tools of promotion to reach this consumer.

If we are restricted in the area of packaging, then we can use something else. We will try to pre-sell the customer before he sees the package. Thus, he won't pay much attention to the package.

We know this is what the purpose of much advertising is so if we just concentrate solely on the problem of the package we are going to find that there are ways to run in to reach the consumer and perhaps leave him in the same situation he was in before.

Consider these limitations: We had a lot of debate on cigarettes. We had a decision to put a warning on the cigarette package. Really, what does this accomplish? Does the consumer go to the store, look at all the packages, read them carefully and then make a decision whether to buy cigarettes at all or to buy a particular brand? No. In this case obviously other forms of promotion are used to sell this consumer in advance. So even though he holds the package and uses it 20 times he never notices that information. He makes his decisions before the time that the package is used and so the advertising here is the great loophole in the packaging case.

Ideally then, we would need to regulate advertising.

Perhaps requiring certain information in the advertisements for cigarettes. I mean again not just television or broadcasting but we are talking about advertising across the board.

Again in this advertising case we picked on the broadcasting industry saying that, well, if we stop it there that is the most powerful one, but this isn't really going to hurt the cigarette industry. They are going to go to another alternative, another type of advertising need.

Well, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola talk about their king-size cartons. Their advertisements reflect the idea that they have these larger size containers in which the drink comes. But I found by sheer accident as a lonely consumer, without the assistance of my wife that the socalled king-size carton in some States is the 12-ounce bottle-six of those and in other States you get a 10-ounce bottle, but it is king

size.

Senator, I live in a 10-ounce State.

To me, this situation reflects the sort of violation at least of the spirit of fairness, if that is a meaningful word, in our packaging law.

Since many consumers don't read the label in detail, it seems to me it is quite easy that the sources of information on which they rely can cause them to make poor choices. Certainly correct and prominent statements of contents and ingredients may help this situation. But so many products are presold before the buyer enters the store. If because of advertising or a friends recommendation or any other sort of information a consumer is told or decides that he will look for Tide or Bird's Eye or look for Vicks, he will simply ignore the details of this label.

We have seen that very simply. You do it yourself. There isn't a consumer that goes to the store that isn't presold to some extent. If a large interesting display is built by the merchant in the store the consumer may buy because the information supplied by the display prompts him, and just the giant size of all these cans or packages sitting there says grab me and the consumer goes for this type of information or whatever the sign says. Some cute little gimmick concerning the in-store display. A salesman can convince the consumer when advertising isn't available or when the package can't do it.

Again, what role does the package have if the salesman can make the sale? Special price may induce the consumer to purchase, or the statement it is supposed to be a special price, whether it is or not. Such as the "cents off label" or such as the many retailers whose signs say "todays special buy" which they post up around a few items they would like to clear up that day without changing the price.

A packaging law, then, is only a beginning in this maze of information that the consumer has to choose between. It is conceivable to imagine a firm emphasis shifting from this packaging to other forms of promotion to overcome any undesirable, and I am using that from the point of view of the promoter, the undesirable legislation or other types of restrictions or education that the consumer might get in order to better intelligently use the package.

We might find successful companies in certain industries who use a different mixture of promotions as examples of how this can be done. In the cosmetics industry, if I label that correctly, we have one company whose primary emphasis is salesmen. Avon. We have another group of companies that are very successful, also. They primarily sell through advertising.

So if you restrict the company in one of these areas they can use the alternative method. What have you accomplished in informing the consumer? Well, there is a lot of other questions that we have to look at that have been mentioned somewhat in previous testimony for this Committee and in other places.

We see all the time that the level of ignorance of the consumer, without going into detail, consumer education is a necessary corollary. Wherever it comes from it is a necessary corollary to using any kind of information that is placed upon packages or is included in advertising. You can still see it or it can still be visible but you don't see it. You have to educate an individual to the use of the information. As we have already seen, it is the person with the least education, the least experience with print advertising, for example, who is more prone and who can least afford these kind of mistakes that the lack of education brings.

Consumers just have bad habits. I call it a bad habit when an advertiser or a marketer will call it brand loyalty.

We have some things to say here, I think, because brand loyalty, from the marketers point of view who has this idea of the consumer in his perfect knowledge in the marketplace, to him it is just unquestionably a desirable goal to build up brand loyalty. But is this necessarily the right brand for this consumer? I think that is always open to question.

So we are lazy as consumers. We have to break the old habit pattern sometimes.

There is a lack of objectives analysis, of information about products to help consumers make complex decisions about whether this particular product fits my peculiar needs.

Where does the consumer turn to make a decision about buying canned peas or automobiles? Really there aren't too many places to turn besides your neighbors and the promotion you see and a littlethe worst method of finding out about a product-experience.

You have to recognize that really as consumers we have not gotten the kind of information. We have never looked at the consumers' problem here to recognize perhaps there are other information sources that need to be developed in our marketing system.

There are a vast variety of different motives of consumers and this is something that the marketing people will point out to us constantly, that if we try to present certain information to the consumer this isn't what all the consumers want so let's not give them any of the information if they all don't want it.

Well, it is true the consumer has many different motives and certainly we have to raise a question and do a careful study of what information we want to give to the consumer. Also, there is a reality that again the marketer points out that we are going to ultimately have to rely on the consumer to make his own choice. We are not going to be able to efficiently make consumers choices for them.

It, of course, is an undesirable thing that we would do such a thing in our society as to make all choices perfectly evident and decided for the consumer in advance. But we are going to have to pay the cost of this in other ways by making these bad choices.

As a footnote to the previous testimony, if we take a look at the cost of this 11 percent, if a family is making $8,000 a year and spending 20 percent of its budget on food and there is 11 percent wasted, there you have a figure of say $175 per family this size in waste from this particular cause.