Content area
Full Text
The purpose of this study is to find out how the population feels about issues related to consumer education in St. Lucia. St. Lucia is one of the smaller islands in the West Indies with an area of 239 square mile and a population of 172,000. For the purpose of data collection, a questionnaire comprising of 31 questions under four sections were used. A total of 500 rural adults consumers were surveyed orally through door-to-door contact. The findings of this study revealed that households comprising 6-8 people experience more problems in the marketplace than those with less than 3 people. The households' with rural adult St. Lucian consumers comprising 5 or less than 5 people seek more information than households comprising 6 or more people. This research gives us a better understanding of the problems faced by rural adult consumers' according to their household composition. The research results will be useful to the government of St. Lucia and the National Consumer Association when they decide to establish an adult consumer education program for St. Lucia.
Introduction
In St. Lucia, consumers are exposed to an array of durable and non-durable products and services. These products are local and foreign in nature, with foreign goods dominating the local market (Ministry of Finance, International Financial Services and Economic Affairs, 2004). These adult consumers can be powerless targets, and eventual victims, of misleading advertisements, dubious itinerant traders, and unscrupulous shopkeepers (Suplido-Belardo, 1995).
Consumerism is more complex than ever because of an increase in products and services in the local and global markets and more ways to buy goods and services. The need for consumer education, which is defined as the process of gaining the knowledge and skills needed to manage consumer resources and take actions to influence the factors that affect consumer decisions (Bannister and Monsma, 1980), has therefore never been greater. The situation is especially disturbing for people living in developing countries, such as St. Lucia, because they have increased access to consumer goods. They are targeted for sales of products and services from the rest of the world, yet consumer protection and education is not as readily available in these countries as in developed countries.
The right to consumer education is one of the eight...