Website lets consumers vent their ire
DOHA: A website has been launched by a group of citizens signalling growing online consumer activism.
After the successful ‘Qtel Fail’ campaign, the site (www.almostahlik.com/vb) takes consumer concerns to a higher plane from disseminating information about consumer laws and rights to market reviews and price comparisons within the local market and with other GCC markets. The interactive website gives people an opportunity to share their concerns and grievances about products and services. It also provides a link for non-Arabic speaking people to have their say.
The most active drive on the site, however, is a boycott campaign against outlets that are perceived as having raised the prices of their goods and services in the wake of the huge salary rise of state employees. The site already mentions the names of several restaurants, clinics and shopping centres, among others, which the website visitors claim have recently increased prices.
Knowledgable circles, though, say that amateurish handling of consumer issues like this could lead to legal complications since outlets wrongly targeted could file defamation lawsuits.
Indiscriminate naming of outlets selling commodities and services might also breach the very principles of free market economy which Qatar as a signatory to the World Trade Organization (WTO) claims to be. Prices in a free market economy are determined by demand and supply.
Almostahlik in Arabic means ‘the consumer.’ The launch of the site appears to be a reaction to perceptions in the Qatari community that the state-controlled Consumer Protection Department (CPD) has failed as an effective consumer rights watchdog.
Some say that it was in fact the CPD which issued warnings to businesses not to raise prices following the salary rise of state employees that might have prompted the launch of the
above website. “The CPD did not specify the exact mechanism of how a possible price rise would be checked…The department is also to blame for not doing enough to create consumer awareness,” said a critic.
In fact, prominent Qatari columnist, Mariam Al Saad, was critical of the CPD writing in a local Arabic daily on Tuesday and said that being state-controlled it was unable to do enough.
“The Qatari youth are awakened and are capable of fighting for their rights…she wrote. What Qatar needs is an independent civil society consumer rights watchdog and not one that is under the control of the government, she said. Al Saad was highly critical of the government wondering whatever happened to the file requesting the setting up of a consumer rights association by prominent civil society members.
“Where is that file now and why the request to have such an association has been turned down by the government,” she wrote in her column. “Why are we being denied civil liberties.”
The Peninsula
