THANKS TO THE INTERNET, and in particular social media platforms, operators of any business, regardless of its character, can increasingly find themselves managing challenges that result from the fears of customers with as much regularity as they look after routine matters such as stock or staff morale.
Our so called information age and its supposed information superhighway may be serving us well in many ways, in the process making our world considerably smaller. But, as has been proven over and over again, a lot more than information moves on that highway these days – with tremendous potential to disrupt the flow of any business.
A perfect case in point presented itself last week with the circulation of two videos on social media, with individuals suggesting that cabbage they bought from two reputable local supermarkets might have been fake produce, made from plastic. This followed a number of similar videos on Facebook during the latter half of the year describing how Chinese operatives were manufacturing imitation cabbage and rice using plastic.
In a Western world that is already wary of Chinese products because of a number of scandals in recent times involving food products, and with anyone with a smartphone having access to this information, it is not difficult to see why officials at Carlton & A1 and Massy supermarkets wasted no time in setting the record straight.
Official statistics put the number of smartphones in use in Barbados today at more than two for every one person in the population – which means that Barbadians must be zooming onto and off that information superhighway with increasing regularity. The phones, with their ubiquitous cameras, allow a level of intrusion into public and private affairs like never before.
This can be a good thing, as in the case highlighted in the SUNDAY SUN newspaper very early last year in which an employee recorded colleagues erasing the expiry dates of foods, under the instructions of supervisors. No sensible business operators these days would take such action when it is virtually impossible to keep these phones out of the workplace. Thanks to such workers, consumers can feel safer.
However, in this most recent episode involving cabbage being “fire tested” by unidentified individuals, there has been no evidence to suggest the product being shown contained plastic, that it came from the locations claimed by the persons in the video, or that there was any conspiracy to offload unhealthy foodstuff on unsuspecting Barbadians.
As citizens we can do better. We ought to be more responsible. By all means, if there is evidence that any business operator is employing less than healthy tactics, then he or she ought to suffer the full consequences of the law, but untrained individuals purporting to be testing and proving the lack of authenticity of a product and making the results known to an at-times gullible public must not be allowed to become the norm.
Perhaps, though, the whole episode suggests that regulatory authorities ought to be far more proactive in their dealings with the public. Individuals who know, understand and respect the work of agencies that are charged with the responsibility of safeguarding the health and well-being of the population are more likely to report their suspicions, as opposed to taking to the Internet with their crude investigations and conclusions.
We will watch to see how this scenario unfolds in 2017.