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Once households start losing confidence in their economic future, they become increasingly concerned with the net usefulness of their consumption expenditures. Yet, ex ante estimates of the value-for-money they expect to derive from their purchases and choices may be a costly exercise, if only time-wise, which most often they cannot afford. Rather than experimenting on their own through trial and error, they tend to turn to cheaper indicators of the efficiency of products and services provided by advertising as well as more neutral sources, such as expert reports published by consumers’ associations. Reviewing a very simple case, we demonstrate that this second (and allegedly more reliable) type of information may not in fact be more dependable than the first, mainly because of the complexity of multi-attribute evaluations but also perhaps because of a lack of means of guaranteeing the representativeness of quality control measurements. While advertisers are challenged by their competitors and are thus forced to be extremely cautious in rationally justifying their claims to superiority, consumers’ organizations operate in a monopolistic environment, enjoying greater freedom, just like the press, because of their status as a countervailing power. For these reasons, we recommend that their comparative testing procedures be certified and regularly audited by the public authorities. We also urge them to spontaneously become more methodologically transparent.