Most of us have had the experience of buying some defective or poor quality products. However, how many of us have returned them to the seller or appealed to court?
According to the data provided by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KMIS), only 10 percent of customers in Ukraine are ready to fight for their rights. The main reason for such passive attitude is psychological discomfort. Experts say that the majority of people are disturbed by the fact that protection of consumer rights is often connected with some sort of a scandal and negative emotions. At the same time, in many European countries people long ago learned to fight for their rights and think about it as about something prestigious rather than shameful.
In order to make it happen in Ukraine and make our citizens more active in protecting their consumer rights, the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the European Union have carried out a three-year national consumer rights protection project. The results are comforting. In 2007, only 20 percent of Ukrainians were ready to act in order to protect their rights and only three to five percent were actually doing it. Now the number of such activists has doubled.
“This project is important for spurring consumers into action; they need to have a different attitude to their consumer rights. People have nearly opposite opinions concerning situations connected with the purchase of poor quality goods. On the one hand, most people agree that it is necessary and reasonable to protect consumer rights. On the other hand, they consider such actions to be complicated and unproductive. This is the reason why in most cases people decide against it,” said Johanna Kazana-Vyshniovetska, deputy resident representative of the UNDP to Ukraine.
The State Committee for Technical Regulation and Consumer Policy (Derzhspozhyvstandart) acknowledges the fact that quality remains one of the most important issues for the consumer market. “Checks show that poor quality and counterfeited products continue to come to the consumption market. That is why a need arose to create a system for consumer rights protection that would reflect the best practices of the developed countries. To this end Derzhspozhyvstandart has already developed a series of draft laws. Soon the State Target Program to Protect Consumer Rights until 2012 will be adopted,” said Yurii Shyrko, deputy head of the committee.
Among the other positive changes in Ukraine’s consumer policy UNDP’s experts name the introduction of the Basics of Consumer Knowledge as a course for school and college students, as well as government officials. By the way, Ukraine was one of the first CIS countries to address the issue of consumer education.
“We hope that the course on consumer culture will give rise to a new generation of consumers who will know their rights and, more importantly, will be ready to protect them,” said Klavdia Maksymenko, manager of the project Consumer Society and Public Organizations.
Similar EU and UNDP projects are being implemented in other European countries. International experts say that the success of such projects depends on citizens’ own initiatives. That is the reason why they encourage Ukrainians to start protecting themselves now instead of waiting for new laws on consumer rights protection to be passed.
