More info, faster

This monthly letter to subscribers from Consumers Union President Jim Guest highlights the critical consumer issues behind our current reports. See archived letters.

If you've shopped for just about anything lately, you've seen the plethora of models that confront consumers these days. A trip to an electronics store can net you more than 100 TVs; the grocery store, 275 boxed cereals; the appliance store, 92 washers.

And that, of course, is where Consumer Reports comes in. We can't test every item out there. But over the past several months we've put enormous effort and expertise into rating more models faster than ever before. It's the new standard for Consumer Reports. We believe that more choice is better only if you can sort through it all.

In this issue, you get the bottom line on more than 500 home and yard products. You may have noticed the jump in TVs we're testing; we now rate more than 130 plasma and high-def models. In March 2008 we rated 101.

This surge in Ratings will show up in 30 categories of products that we test. And now we're telling you when a model is in testing, even before we have the full results, so that you can keep an eye out for it in future Ratings.

In "The Paradox of Choice," Barry Schwartz writes, "As the number of options increases, the effort required to make a good decision escalates as well, which is one of the reasons that choice can be transformed from a blessing into a burden."

That's a burden no consumer should have to bear alone. As Schwartz says, "Having the opportunity to choose is no blessing if we do not have the wherewithal to choose wisely." Presenting the wherewithal: Consumer Reports.

Jim Guest
President