"number one zealot for consumers"
A long read but definitely "entertaining" !!!
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[snip]
Dworsky says he loves to hunt, not for deer or game, but for free merchandise. It was Stop & Shop, Dworsky says, that sparked his enthusiasm for the chase: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the supermarket vowed that if the price on an item was higher than the advertised sale price, the customer would get the item free. "It became a challenge for me to go in and find mismarked items," Dworsky says. On one particularly memorable shopping trip, he and a friend snared $150 worth of free groceries, including canned hams, turkeys, and roasts.
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Dworsky was one of three consumer advocates whom state officials invited to the bargaining table as they tried to broker a deal with Massachusetts supermarkets on the testing of a controversial new electronic shelf-pricing system.
The supermarkets hope the shelf-pricing system will do away with the need to mark prices on individual items in their stores, as state law now requires. Dworsky was included because he knows more about the issue than anyone else: He wrote the law the supermarkets hope to erase. In fact, on most pocketbook consumer issues, he is the closest thing the state has to an institutional memory.
"What we don't have enough of in this state is people like Edgar," says Robert Sherman, who used to be Dworsky's boss at the attorney general's office and now works for a law firm in Boston. "There isn't anybody that has stepped up to replace him. In fact, many people have dropped off, but Edgar has stayed with it."
The shelf-pricing battle typifies Dworsky's passion for the details of consumer life. It began in early 1986, when Dworsky was director of consumer education in the Dukakis administration. He urged the governor to veto a bill that would have exempted supermarkets from the state law requiring retailers to stamp prices on each item in their stores. He then negotiated compromise legislation that exempted a handful of supermarket items, including milk, eggs, and greeting cards, from the law.
For supermarkets, the compromise left a bad aftertaste. They were stuck trying to make sure that the prices marked on 40,000 items matched the prices on store shelves and the prices at checkout scanners; it was a logistical nightmare. They wanted, as they still do, to scrap item pricing and replace it with electronic systems that would display prices at the shelf and be tied in by computer with checkout scanners. The systems, supermarket officials said, would eliminate pricing errors and free workers to serve customers.
But each time the supermarkets made a push in the Legislature to do away with item pricing, Dworsky was there to block them. He considers item pricing an enormous consumer benefit: Survey research indicates, he says, that two-thirds of Massachusetts consumers learn the price of a can of beans by looking at the can, not at the shelf. Consumers also depend on item prices to compare prices and to verify that they are charged correctly at the checkout counter.
Christopher Flynn, the executive director of the Massachusetts Food Association, which represents the state's supermarket industry, wanted Dworsky at the table for the current shelf-pricing negotiations, even though some of the group's members weren't crazy about the idea. "If he's not at the table, he esssentially will cause us all sorts of difficulty," says a resigned Flynn, who used to work with Dworsky on consumer issues at the attorney general's office. "He knows how to whip up consumer advocates and consumer reporters."
After some tense negotiations, the supermarket industry has basically agreed to run a test of the shelf-pricing system, at a handful of stores, on the items in those stores that don't need to be marked individually. It wasn't what the supermarkets wanted - indeed, the stores had rejected a similar test years ago - but they are hoping that the test will succeed, and then translate into action on Beacon Hill.
Flynn doesn't expect Dworsky ever to go along with ending item pricing. He says it's a perfect example of how Dworsky's mistrust of business always takes him to an extreme position. Flynn says consumers only want to pay the correct price for an item, while Dworsky favors a costly, complicated system that will lead to mismarked items that he can get for free. "He likes to set up laws the way he likes to shop," Flynn says. "Well, let me tell you, most people don't shop the way Edgar shops."
That's certainly true. But Dworsky thinks his concerns are valid and are shared by most consumers. "I always say there's a little bit of Edgar in everyone," he says. "How much you admit to, and how much you practice, is another matter."
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Complete article @ globe.com
Mr. Dworsky's web site is at consumerworld.org. I searched it for "esl" and came up with securitieslaw.com ... hmmmmmm |
