History of the Better Business Bureau
The event that is pointed to in Wikipedia as a causal factor for the Better Business Bureau was a court case pitting Coca-Cola against the United States Government back in 1906.
Coca-Cola executive Samuel C. Dobbs began the ‘Truth in Advertising’ movement in response to that debacle, which was costly to the company. Various organizations sprang up to act as responsible intermediaries between companies and consumers. It took decades for them to coalesce into the BBB. There are no independent Better Business Bureaus.
The government had just recently brought in the Pure Food and Drug Act which eventually led to the creation of the FDA. Going after Coca-Cola seems like a poor use of resources when the original intent of the act was to rid the USA of toxic patent medicines that were being peddled by hundreds of little companies.
