Consumers, Arise!

Britain's businessmen in recent years have become so used to hearing their efforts excoriated by local politicians and extolled by visiting diplomats that they seldom stop to listen to either. Last week they pricked up their ears when a departing diplomat reversed the process. A successful U.S. businessman for 40 years (metal factory, condensed milk, the Ask Mr. Foster travel agency), grey-haired Francis E. Rogers of New York City went to Britain in 1951 with an American aid mission to spend five years observing British factories. On the eve of his departure for home, he got off a blunt bread-and-butter message to his British hosts.

"It is not unfair to say," Rogers told newsmen at a luncheon in his honor, "that competition might well be substituted for complacency" in a British economy that is largely burdened by "timeconsuming inefficiency. If larger and more efficient firms in the United Kingdom were to stop holding umbrellas over the less efficient and were to expose them to real competition, it would strengthen your country's position in world trade and bring better standards of living at home."

Because of the lack of competition, continued Rogers, many British products "are shoddy, often poorly inspected and generally overpriced. Often a pair of shoes does not match. Sometimes two shoes in a pair were made each on a different last. In this country, the consumer is a completely forgotten man. Let him get up on his hind legs and say: Trices are too high. Styling is ridiculous, and I won't buy it.' " In Diplomat Rogers' mind, Britain's consumers, industrial managers and trade unions alike are all to blame for a situation that spoils the economy because of a misplaced sense of charity, which makes Britons feel that competition just "isn't cricket."

Britain's shoe manufacturers promptly damned the U.S. businessman's remarks as "unwarranted nonsense," and the National Union of Manufacturers loftily announced that "we have no evidence which would support his criticism." But in the subsequent wave of second thoughts, Rogers found champions among the British themselves. His criticism, said the Laborite Daily Herald, "is a scathing indictment and a challenge. Mr. Rogers knows British industry, and if it is anything like as bad as he says, it is a poor outlook unless we waken up soon." "Our declining share in the world market," the Conservative Daily Telegraph added, "is warning enough against treating what he said as though we could learn nothing from it."

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