Hacker News Reader

Comment by callahad | Hacker News Reader

In the UK, https://www.which.co.uk/ fills a similar niche to Consumer Reports.

I used to subscribe and they were generally good, but they made no account of cost.

So you might have (made up example) an Electrolux vacuum getting a score of 73, but a Dyson gets a score of 74 and wins their "recommended buy" then you see the Dyson is, like, twice the price.

I can see they might do the review price-blind, but it does make one suspicious that they get some sort of financial benefit from having top picks be vastly more expensive products.

Useful reviews though.

It is good to be sceptical, but Which? is a charity that doesn't take advertising money, and keeps afloat with paid subscriptions. If it got out that they were taking kickbacks, even setting aside the probable illegality, they'd never sell a subscription again.

It's one thing for some shady website with little to no reputation to lie about these things, but Which is an old company whose model is entirely based on trust.

Which? annoys me in various ways, but not taking the cost into account in their ratings is I think actually one of their better moves.

In your example, you can see very plainly that the Electrolux is a much better buy. If they'd included cost in the rating, you'd probably be left wondering whether the Dyson was worth the extra.

I used to subscribe to Consumer Reports back in the day, and basically regretted it. They rarely described their testing methodologies and more often than now, when they did, I wasn't impressed. Their testing usually just boiled down to whether or not the specs met the manufacturers claims, not anything useful like how well it was built and how long it is likely to last.

Australia: https://www.choice.com.au/ New Zealand: http://consumer.org.nz/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com