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Yikes: > A Wall Street Journal investigation found 4,152 items for sale on Amazon.com Inc. ’s site that have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are dece

by cs702 7y ago

Yikes: > A Wall Street Journal investigation found 4,152 items for sale on Amazon.com Inc. ’s site that have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled or are banned by federal regulators—items that big-box retailers’ policies would bar from their shelves. Among those items, at least 2,000 listings for toys and medications lacked warnings about health risks to children. > Of the 4,152 products the Journal identified, 46% were listed as shipping from Amazon warehouses. This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades. Shame on Amazon.

djsumdog 7y ago
I always wondered how we got all these reports of lead in products and children's toys. There was a post a few weeks back where someone explained it and it made perfect sense: recycling. China takes a ton of US recycling. They often melt down metals, e-waste and solder and it's difficult to separated out lead and unleaded source material. A lot of it just gets put together and used in bulk.
- DataWorker 7y ago
  They have these issues due to corruption, greed and negligence. With recycling as with other stuff, China cheats and poisons people to make a quick dollar, decades go by and nothing changes and nobody goes to prison. Think of how many people use Chinese made pots and pans, or knives, and have no clue they’re poisoning themselves and their families just to save a few bucks by buying the cheap Chinese version.
  - fmajid 7y ago
    To be fair, when someone is caught doing this in China, they are executed. In the US, their fancy lawyers get them off with a slap on the wrist.
    - floren 7y ago
      Generally, they blame a "temporary worker", bribe a disinterested party official, and stop putting the poison in that particular product... For now, anyway.
  - maccard 7y ago
    > just to save a few bucks by buying the cheap Chinese version. Or not knowing they're buying a cheap chinese version.
    - coroxout 7y ago
      Yeah, with the problem Amazon US (maybe elsewhere too?) has with fakes which get mixed in with the real stock at the distribution centre, and the problem I have on Amazon UK where no matter what household product I search for all the results are from brands I've never heard of, many of which are obviously Chinese from the name, or I'd guess are Chinese from the weird English or the mystery chunky quotation marks all over the description, it's not so easy to know any more. I have a new rescue cat and I was going to buy some cat toys but after half an hour on Amazon I felt increasingly unsure that any of the products were safe for my cat to sink her teeth into, so I guess all the toys she's getting will be coming from the local pet megastore, the only pet shop left on this side of town.
      - maccard 7y ago
        I recently got a dog and had a very similar experience. The only toys I could see that I could attempt to trust were Kong toys, but they were more expensive on amazon, weren’t covered by prime and the delivery time was 2-3 days.
  - adinobro 7y ago
    Who is sending the recycling there rather than actually recycling it? Corruption, greed and negligence seems to be everywhere.
    - outside1234 7y ago
      Everyone? Seriously, there is no recycling. There is trash that ends up in the United States and trash that ends up in Asia.
      - adinobro 7y ago
        There is recycling for paper and, hard plastic and metal. There is also recycling for foodwaste. The problem is that it cannot be contaminated so it either needs to be separated or it does become trash.
- x0x0 7y ago
  Also, if you don't give a shit about your customers, lead paint often dries faster, is more durable, and is cheaper than alternatives. I suspect this is a more common reason. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/business/worldbusiness/10iht-lead.5.7455679.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/business/worldbusiness/10...
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Kids' toys aside, using the lowest cost option that satisfies your customers' requirements sounds a lot like "giving a shit" to me. The fact that lead paint is totally banned (here in the US) instead of just banned in paint marketed for use on/in inhabitable structures and allowed with warning labels required is asinine. There's tons of chemicals out there that will screw up kids and adults if they eat them and we don't ban them. We just let the civil court system assign appropriate judgements to anyone dumb enough to use them on things that will come in close enough contact with people to be harmful. Edit: The stereotypical effect of lead exposure is that it makes people stupid. I hope you people appreciate the irony in the fact that we can't have a serious discussion about the pros and cons of lead paint.
    - btown 7y ago
      How do you enforce this? How can a consumer know that their contractor isn’t cutting corners? Sometimes the only solution is to stop the problem at its source.
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        How does a consumer ever know their someone they've hired isn't cutting corners? When you pay for asbestos remediation how do you know they actually did it right? When you pay an accountant how do you know they're not half-assing it? When you make your living doing a thing it's far more lucrative to do things right than to do them wrong. There's a bunch of incentives business owners who provide services operate within and they generally align to doing things the right way.
treis 7y ago
IMHO, it's a hatchet job that groups relatively innocuous things with dangerous things to inflate numbers. For example, take this: >1,412 electronics listings falsely claimed to be UL certified—indicating they met voluntary industry safety standards—or didn’t provide enough information to verify the claim. Falsely claiming to UL certified is dangerous. Not providing enough information to verify the claim is pretty benign if they actually meet standards. This isn't to say that they aren't largely correct about Amazon's commitment to quality and safety. Just that this is an alarmist piece that doesn't rest on sound reasoning.
berdon 7y ago
> This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades. It's the kind of thing that _should_ destroy reputations. But that doesn't happen all that much anymore. We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness.
- ethbro 7y ago
  > We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness. The 1980s?
  - berdon 7y ago
    I don't know - maybe? Admittedly, I was just getting out of diapers at the tail end of the 80s. Perhaps this kind of thing revolves around the onset of new communication mediums and the general adoption and ease of use. Newspapers, easy to read, hard to publish - "trusted" source. Printing press and/or other technologies aid printing and trust drops. Radio, TV, internet follow.
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    Depends on the act, and the accused, I guess. I'm sure similar things happened in the 1980s - I was a kid who didn't pay much attention to that kind of thing back then. But there were plenty of scandals of a lesser nature that would ruin people, with even a hint of impropriety. Again - it depended on the act, the person(s) involved, and perhaps the way our society's wind was blowing (as always). I can guarantee you, though, that some of things we currently witness on a daily basis would have absolutely destroyed people, careers, brands, you name it - even just 10 years ago, yet today it's just "oh, that's nice - let's see what happens tomorrow" - yesterday's scandal already forgotten. Again - it does depend on the act and the person; you can think about many recent people who have "been in the news" for similar accusations, if not all-but-proved acts, and wonder "Why this guy, and not this other one?" For some reason, we skewer only a selected few, and in many cases, not the ones who really need and deserve it, either.
cdubzzz 7y ago
> This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades. FWIW, this article finally got my wife to say she'll stop buying from Amazon and I'm glad for that. I stopped years ago for this and other reasons, but have never quite explained my reasoning well enough to convince her.
chibg10 7y ago
Disclaimer: Amazon employee, opinions are my own This claim really doesn't say much on its own. There are millions (billions?) of products on Amazon. This would be potentially a lot more damning if they released how many items they searched through to identify those 4,152. It would also be nice if they provided some data on how prevalent these problems are at other retailers and marketplaces. There's reason to believe the problem is probably worse at Amazon (automated approval process, historic emphasis on low cost and selection) but how much worse is it?
- tsunamifury 7y ago
  Wow. Amazon sells unsafe and banned products and you literally quote the first line of the narcissist prayer: “it’s not a big deal”
  - dang 7y ago
    That crosses into personal attack, which isn't ok here. Also, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting some when you're not. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - tsunamifury 7y ago
      You are right of course, but in light of defending truly bad decisions, how else do we help our community hold itself responsible for its decisions at work?
      - dang 7y ago
        I'm not sure I saw the GP "defending truly bad decisions", but the answer in such cases is to explain why the decisions are bad without breaking the site guidelines. The guidelines are there to prevent the community from destroying itself, so they're a precondition for "helping our community to hold itself responsible" and other higher-order activities of that sort.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by cs702 7y ago

djsumdog 7y ago

I always wondered how we got all these reports of lead in products and children's toys. There was a post a few weeks back where someone explained it and it made perfect sense: recycling. China takes a ton of US recycling. They often melt down metals, e-waste and solder and it's difficult to separated out lead and unleaded source material. A lot of it just gets put together and used in bulk.

DataWorker 7y ago
They have these issues due to corruption, greed and negligence. With recycling as with other stuff, China cheats and poisons people to make a quick dollar, decades go by and nothing changes and nobody goes to prison. Think of how many people use Chinese made pots and pans, or knives, and have no clue they’re poisoning themselves and their families just to save a few bucks by buying the cheap Chinese version.
- fmajid 7y ago
  To be fair, when someone is caught doing this in China, they are executed. In the US, their fancy lawyers get them off with a slap on the wrist.
  - floren 7y ago
    Generally, they blame a "temporary worker", bribe a disinterested party official, and stop putting the poison in that particular product... For now, anyway.
- maccard 7y ago
  > just to save a few bucks by buying the cheap Chinese version. Or not knowing they're buying a cheap chinese version.
  - coroxout 7y ago
    Yeah, with the problem Amazon US (maybe elsewhere too?) has with fakes which get mixed in with the real stock at the distribution centre, and the problem I have on Amazon UK where no matter what household product I search for all the results are from brands I've never heard of, many of which are obviously Chinese from the name, or I'd guess are Chinese from the weird English or the mystery chunky quotation marks all over the description, it's not so easy to know any more. I have a new rescue cat and I was going to buy some cat toys but after half an hour on Amazon I felt increasingly unsure that any of the products were safe for my cat to sink her teeth into, so I guess all the toys she's getting will be coming from the local pet megastore, the only pet shop left on this side of town.
    - maccard 7y ago
      I recently got a dog and had a very similar experience. The only toys I could see that I could attempt to trust were Kong toys, but they were more expensive on amazon, weren’t covered by prime and the delivery time was 2-3 days.
- adinobro 7y ago
  Who is sending the recycling there rather than actually recycling it? Corruption, greed and negligence seems to be everywhere.
  - outside1234 7y ago
    Everyone? Seriously, there is no recycling. There is trash that ends up in the United States and trash that ends up in Asia.
    - adinobro 7y ago
      There is recycling for paper and, hard plastic and metal. There is also recycling for foodwaste. The problem is that it cannot be contaminated so it either needs to be separated or it does become trash.
x0x0 7y ago
Also, if you don't give a shit about your customers, lead paint often dries faster, is more durable, and is cheaper than alternatives. I suspect this is a more common reason. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/business/worldbusiness/10iht-lead.5.7455679.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/business/worldbusiness/10...
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Kids' toys aside, using the lowest cost option that satisfies your customers' requirements sounds a lot like "giving a shit" to me. The fact that lead paint is totally banned (here in the US) instead of just banned in paint marketed for use on/in inhabitable structures and allowed with warning labels required is asinine. There's tons of chemicals out there that will screw up kids and adults if they eat them and we don't ban them. We just let the civil court system assign appropriate judgements to anyone dumb enough to use them on things that will come in close enough contact with people to be harmful. Edit: The stereotypical effect of lead exposure is that it makes people stupid. I hope you people appreciate the irony in the fact that we can't have a serious discussion about the pros and cons of lead paint.
  - btown 7y ago
    How do you enforce this? How can a consumer know that their contractor isn’t cutting corners? Sometimes the only solution is to stop the problem at its source.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      How does a consumer ever know their someone they've hired isn't cutting corners? When you pay for asbestos remediation how do you know they actually did it right? When you pay an accountant how do you know they're not half-assing it? When you make your living doing a thing it's far more lucrative to do things right than to do them wrong. There's a bunch of incentives business owners who provide services operate within and they generally align to doing things the right way.

treis 7y ago

IMHO, it's a hatchet job that groups relatively innocuous things with dangerous things to inflate numbers. For example, take this: >1,412 electronics listings falsely claimed to be UL certified—indicating they met voluntary industry safety standards—or didn’t provide enough information to verify the claim. Falsely claiming to UL certified is dangerous. Not providing enough information to verify the claim is pretty benign if they actually meet standards. This isn't to say that they aren't largely correct about Amazon's commitment to quality and safety. Just that this is an alarmist piece that doesn't rest on sound reasoning.

berdon 7y ago

> This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades. It's the kind of thing that _should_ destroy reputations. But that doesn't happen all that much anymore. We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness.

ethbro 7y ago
> We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness. The 1980s?
- berdon 7y ago
  I don't know - maybe? Admittedly, I was just getting out of diapers at the tail end of the 80s. Perhaps this kind of thing revolves around the onset of new communication mediums and the general adoption and ease of use. Newspapers, easy to read, hard to publish - "trusted" source. Printing press and/or other technologies aid printing and trust drops. Radio, TV, internet follow.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  Depends on the act, and the accused, I guess. I'm sure similar things happened in the 1980s - I was a kid who didn't pay much attention to that kind of thing back then. But there were plenty of scandals of a lesser nature that would ruin people, with even a hint of impropriety. Again - it depended on the act, the person(s) involved, and perhaps the way our society's wind was blowing (as always). I can guarantee you, though, that some of things we currently witness on a daily basis would have absolutely destroyed people, careers, brands, you name it - even just 10 years ago, yet today it's just "oh, that's nice - let's see what happens tomorrow" - yesterday's scandal already forgotten. Again - it does depend on the act and the person; you can think about many recent people who have "been in the news" for similar accusations, if not all-but-proved acts, and wonder "Why this guy, and not this other one?" For some reason, we skewer only a selected few, and in many cases, not the ones who really need and deserve it, either.

cdubzzz 7y ago

> This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades. FWIW, this article finally got my wife to say she'll stop buying from Amazon and I'm glad for that. I stopped years ago for this and other reasons, but have never quite explained my reasoning well enough to convince her.

chibg10 7y ago

Disclaimer: Amazon employee, opinions are my own This claim really doesn't say much on its own. There are millions (billions?) of products on Amazon. This would be potentially a lot more damning if they released how many items they searched through to identify those 4,152. It would also be nice if they provided some data on how prevalent these problems are at other retailers and marketplaces. There's reason to believe the problem is probably worse at Amazon (automated approval process, historic emphasis on low cost and selection) but how much worse is it?

tsunamifury 7y ago
Wow. Amazon sells unsafe and banned products and you literally quote the first line of the narcissist prayer: “it’s not a big deal”
- dang 7y ago
  That crosses into personal attack, which isn't ok here. Also, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting some when you're not. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - tsunamifury 7y ago
    You are right of course, but in light of defending truly bad decisions, how else do we help our community hold itself responsible for its decisions at work?
    - dang 7y ago
      I'm not sure I saw the GP "defending truly bad decisions", but the answer in such cases is to explain why the decisions are bad without breaking the site guidelines. The guidelines are there to prevent the community from destroying itself, so they're a precondition for "helping our community to hold itself responsible" and other higher-order activities of that sort.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]