Consumers, shut up and take your pain

THE EDITOR: Please permit me space to respond to a recent complaint where a cable subscriber lamented the shoddy treatment from the country’s lone cable supplier.

I wish to tell the subscriber and all other consumers through Trinidad and Tobago, please shut your collective mouths and take your pain and suffering! Earlier in the year, a lady named Lynette, a lone housewife, started a campaign to boycott the cable company in an effort at some kind of reform.  We recall as one example that rates increased multiple times in one year.  Lynette started the ball rolling and I contributed by sending e-mails all over the place trying to drum up massive support in a show of consumer power. What a colossal waste of time and energy!  Trinidad and Tobago responded by not responding.  You folks did nothing.  You said nothing.  There was no boycott.  Cable TV was too important for folks to do without.  In short, we got no support. Now you and others like you want to come today and complain bitterly about how shabbily a monopoly company is treating you?  What a joke!  I can see Mr Cleary laughing all the way to the bank.  And rightly so.  People in Trinidad and Tobago know and care nothing about exercising their rights as consumers.  You prefer to pay the bill and complain, complain.  And all the while, the power lies within you, the consumer.

Another example: within recent months the cost of flour went up supposedly due to external factors. Everybody from bakers to doubles vendors to pie salesmen wasted no time in hiking their prices.  When the cost of flour came back down, we had only a few bakeries lowering their prices. I excercised my power by refusing to buy from those bakeries that retained the higher prices. I don’t buy sandwich loaf anymore.  I no longer buy potato and chicken pies every Saturday and Sunday morning at my favourite pie vendor in El Socorro. And yet, I can safely say that most consumers don’t engage in such protest action.  How do I know? The vendors haven’t felt the pinch in their wallet, their prices are still up.  Right now, they’re laughing at us.  Don’t doubt it.  Any protest action consumers attempt is short lived since the vendors ride it out longer than the consumers are willing to do without. In the end, we Trinidadians and Tobagonians, in true nine-day-wonder form, abandon the effort and go back to paying the high prices.

Chicken was no different.  The very week chicken prices hit their highest, I saw a woman in a grocery in posh Valsayn purchasing what amounted to over $150 in frozen whole chicken!  Was there some form of inverse protest at work here?  The higher the cost, the more you buy?  The woman apparently couldn’t care less, after all, she could afford it, right? Say what you will about countries like the United States, but believe this, consumers in the US don’t go for that kind of nonsense.  The resolve of the American consumer is legendary and swift. None of you has the right to complain now about monopolies and shabby treatment.  You certainly have the power to effect change, but what good is this power if you don’t use it?  If you are unwilling to use your consumer power, then shut the hell up, remain silent and suffer in dumb anguish!    

Dion Jennings
San Juan