Consumers are thought of by some to be the number one stakeholder of businesses. As stakeholders, consumers have interests to be protected. The rights and general welfare of consumers are protected by several groups. These include government agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Federal Citizen Information Center, independent consumer activist groups like those started by Ralph Nader, and other non-governmental organizations such as Consumer WebWatch and Consumer Reports. Another group that has fairly recently started protecting consumers are local news programs. Protection by these groups can be through proposing, informing, and enforcing standards for companies and keeping consumers informed and aware. Acts taken by these groups help prevent advertising abuses and injuries to consumers, as well as protect consumers against other fraudulent or deceitful information and companies. They also work to ensure consumers have choices by trying to keep competition predominant over monopolies.
A stakeholder is any individual or group that holds one or more interests or shares in a business' undertakings. They are somehow affected by the business and have some influence on the business. Without consumers, businesses have no real purpose, so it is easy to see that consumers qualify as a stakeholder group. However, they were not recognized as stakeholders previously when business was perceived to have less stakeholders. At one time, the main stakeholders included only the founders and their families or a group of owner-investors. Business has evolved to a point where “the business organization today, especially the modern corporation, is the institutional centerpiece of a complex society” (Carroll & Buchholtz p63). Due to this fact, through the years the institution of business has had to acknowledge new stakeholders as they arose. One of the primary social stakeholders being consumers who like...