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> As recently as October 2018, Target’s trade-in website claimed, “Used car seats shouldn’t be sold or given away, since they expire every six years and regulat

by wahern 7y ago

> As recently as October 2018, Target’s trade-in website claimed, “Used car seats shouldn’t be sold or given away, since they expire every six years and regulations change constantly.” This hints to at least one good reason: so defective designs or models don't linger too long. Similarly, manufacturers have an interest, a priori, in discouraging a second-hand market to limit their exposure if and when any defects are found, especially if they lead to injuries. Of course, the most important reason is almost certainly because planned obsolescence leads to more sales. > Instead of destroying 500,000 used seats over the years, Target could have safely marketed them to emerging markets. They would’ve sold, and many children would be safer because their parents had access to a secondhand market. Hahahaha. That would never happen. The optics would be horrible, both domestically and internationally. Such a good deed could never go unpunished. I think drug companies do dump pharmaceuticals near their expiration date into cheaper markets. But the drugs aren't actually expired, and they're certainly not used. Interestingly, AFAIU the expiration date for many drugs is also largely pulled out of thin air; they often retain their potency for many years after the supposed expiration date. OTOH, proving efficacy can be more difficult and risky.

georgeecollins 7y ago
Yeah but did you ever read the chapter of Freakonomics about car seats? Car seats improve children's chance of injury over every case except the one where kids sit in the back seat with an old fashioned seat belt on. Compared to that, car seats perform about the same. (Note: I get that an infant can't use a regular seat belt.) It's true that car seats have been great for safety. But a lot of that (if not most) is that it forced parents to put their kids in the back seat of the car (much safer) in most cases and always secured by a belt. The idea that a newer car seat has some magic safety improvement that is say, more important then the difference in safety between a mini-van and a two seat sportscar is a fallacy. If you are worried about your kid being safe in a car, put them in a minivan and have them sit in a car seat in the middle back. Even with an old car seat that is very safe.
- drtillberg 7y ago
  For families with 3 children, the child car seat requirement generally pushes them into a minivan because you can't install car seats 3 to a row, so you need an extra row. And then you still max out at 1 friend instead of 3, because even a minivan won't seat more than 4 child car seats. It's also not magic getting your children into a car seat. It takes time, the angles are awkward, and when parked on a busy road it often exposes parents to traffic. I've only heard of 1 fatal accident through where a parent was struck by a car (sideswiped) while fiddling with a car seat.
  - mrfusion 7y ago
    I have a crazy theory that car sizes (and prices) are what are limiting the number of children people have. It would be ridiculous to try to transport a five child family these days.
    - jtbayly 7y ago
      The USA is economically oppressive to larger families in many ways like this.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      I would go with lack of parental leave, decreasing income security, stagnating wages, student loan debt, enormous healthcare expenses, and need for dual income households as well as being in school for longer periods of time to secure good jobs over car sizes and prices. Not to mention minivans exist and aren’t that expensive compared to cars.
    - sjg007 7y ago
      Well you can buy a suburban and an eight passenger minivan.. they do still sell 15 passenger vans as well....
  - jefftk 7y ago
    I often do three car seats in a row across the back of midsized cars like the Toyota Corolla. It's very tight, but it works. (You do need relatively compact seats; I'm using the cheapest Walmart seat)
sjg007 7y ago
Car seats are regulated by the Feds. They get recalled. If a second hand car seat is recalled it shouldn’t be sold etc...
jedimastert 7y ago
> Hahahaha. That would never happen. The optics would be horrible, both domestically and internationally. Such a good deed could never go unpunished. This is, I will point out, the same reason "expired" or almost "expired" produce and groceries get destroyed or thrown away instead of donated. In almost all cases the food is still perfectly safe, and most stores assume (incorrectly) that they would be liable for any illness caused by "expired" food. But the optics would also look terrible because most people just don't realize that food doesn't magically go from perfectly safe to toxic the instant it does beyond the date written on the package. I have a friend who runs a homeless charity and she tried to get the (many) grocery stored to donate constantly. Almost all of the chains have corporate policy against it for liability reasons.
- newshorts 7y ago
  I used to work at a shelter. We had an “in” with a local grocery store. They would throw the leftover food out by placing it in nicely on the back dock instead of the dumpster.
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    Places that forbid this tend to do so because it's the only way to cure rampant theft. "Oh, I thought that £500 of fresh rump steak was expired. Whoops. No, I have no idea how my old school friend happened to know I'd made that mistake so as to arrive in a truck less than a minute after I carefully stacked the boxes of steak in the disposal area". For stuff with a Best Before rather than Use By tag all the cheaper stores I use just mark it down. Crisps that "expired" two months ago probably aren't as crisp as they intended (moisture in the outside air will very slowly penetrate even the metalized foil container) but they're not dangerous, if your budget is tight maybe 50% off is a good deal on those crisps. For Use By stuff yeah, probably eating these cooked chicken slices on Tuesday after they expired on Monday won't kill me, but I get where they're coming from. It's about margin, just like on aircraft. If you're on a twin-engine jetliner and it loses the left engine in cruise, that plane is still fine, it was designed to handle the stress of maximum power take-off on a single engine every time. It could definitely still go to your destination. But it won't - it's completely understandable that we always treat that plane as an emergency and try to get it down immediately for the sake of safety margin.
charles_f 7y ago
> But the drugs aren't actually expired, and they're certainly not used Note that author is referring to used car seats, not expired ones. Comparing used car seats to used drugs is not very fair. A closer sense for "used" when referring to a car seat compared to what "used" means for a drug would probably be one that was involved in a crash, and that is not what the article is mentioning. But to your point this won't happen. Besides the supply chain nightmare and risks if the seats were effectively involved in a crash, that would make the whole campaign moot: how do you justify why you should throw a used car seat away and then send it to another country? And we most certainly don't want that if the goal is to sell AMAP car seats
NullPrefix 7y ago
>defective designs [...] don't linger too long Shouldn't defective designs be recalled right away instead of at expiration date?
- ovi256 7y ago
  Customers don't comply 100% with a safety recall. This reduced manufacturer liability by reducing the lingering.
- bluGill 7y ago
  If it is past the expiration date they don't have to recall it at all. Saves a lot of money when nearly every car seat ever made was recalled at some point (or so it seems - as a parent every carseat I've ever bought has been recalled at some time within 5 years).
2rsf 7y ago
> they often retain their potency for many years after the supposed expiration date With the exception of few drugs that do go bad "often" is not good enough, AFAIU it's a statistical game of certainties- I want to be X% certain that the drug has Y% of its potency
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
>Hahahaha. That would never happen. The optics would be horrible, both domestically and internationally. Such a good deed could never go unpunished. A university I worked for had a partnership with a nearby inner city elementary school. University employees did a lot of volunteer work for the elementary school, everything from weekend landscaping to weekday reading for storytime. When we upgraded a lab full of computers, we donated the older computers to the elementary school. Reinstalled the OS and productivity software, set up the network, and did all the work on physical placement, even cleaned the storage room being turned into a computer lab. These weren't obsolete machines, they just weren't cutting edge. Two weeks after the new computers were setup the local paper ran a front page (thankfully below the fold) article on how we had dumped junk computers on the school. All of the quotes from the teachers were anonymous but it was obvious they were upset they didn't get the newest toys to play with. The e-rate scandal a few years previous hit the school and others like it pretty hard so until then they were accustomed to getting everything new-in-box. The principal did call the university to apologize and express gratitude for the computers but the damage to the university's public image and the partnership between the schools was already done. The volunteer work continued but it faded out over the next couple of years.
- martin_a 7y ago
  The company I'm working for is in the food industry. We used to give away overproduction and returns (returned for "print on the packaging is not 100% on point" nothing wrong with the goods) to local kindergartens and schools and clubs and whoever asked for free. We stopped that after people were complaining that their received goods did not have a good print or that the print somehow was "off-topic" or whatever. Now everything that gets returned is going straight to the trash.
CoolGuySteve 7y ago
What bothers me more about "expiry" of car seats is that this logic isn't applied to other toys. My parents gave me some Duplos from the 80s. After looking it up, the red and yellow bricks contained unsafe levels of cadmium. Legos are often advertised as being lifetime toys that can be passed down but this just isn't true. I'd like to see mandatory UPC codes etched into toys/car seats/strollers so that they can be identified for recalls. That way this nonsense about 'expiry' of otherwise durable goods can stop while overall safety improves.
- gnode 7y ago
  Going beyond the obvious motive of child car seat manufacturers wanting to undermine the second-hand market, I expect design flaws could also play a part. In case there is a flaw, e.g. poisons; unexpected decay of material strength; mold growth, then it's good to reduce the number of the old product around in case it's discovered, and a lawsuit manifests. Possibly the expiration could even mitigate damages in case of liability. While superfluous product expiry is generally useful for selling more of any kind of product, a safety device for children is exactly the kind of product where mitigating liability from latent design flaws would be desirable for a manufacturer.
turk73 7y ago
As soon as you have kids you recognize a pattern: Every car seat, stroller, high chair, and crib gets recalled. Every single one. The companies want to eliminate the secondary market for these products and they are damn good at it using lawyers. This is massive bullshit and it contributes to a massive waste stream. It is a big reason why having a family is so damned un-affordable. What if cars expired? I used the same hand me down car seats for both my kids. I also bought one actual car seat of the larger variety at one point because the technology actually did improve some. The booster seats chap my hide--an uncomfortable hunk of plastic for a kid to sit on so I can be legally compliant but are a stone-cold bitch for the kid to sit on during long car rides. As soon as my kids looked big enough I tossed those booster seats in the trash where they belong. It is all safety meddling by a bunch of busy-body twats who either have a profit motive or just enjoy authoritarianism. It is the same mindset that gave us Prohibition. Saving us from ourselves only to create a much bigger problem in the long run. How many times have we seen that play out? Alcohol (we sort of of fixed that one, yay), drugs (cartels--been to Mexico lately?), healthcare (the costs, my word!) , automobiles (how many more airbags do we need?), student loans (but everyone should be able to go to college and become debt slaves), housing bubble (everyone should be able to afford to buy their own home), you name it, the meddlers have wrecked it. I pretty much lay all of it at the feet of do-gooding Democrats, but I know that Republicans are equally to blame because they do it for banker profit motive reasons rather than misguided altruism.

by wahern 7y ago

georgeecollins 7y ago

Yeah but did you ever read the chapter of Freakonomics about car seats? Car seats improve children's chance of injury over every case except the one where kids sit in the back seat with an old fashioned seat belt on. Compared to that, car seats perform about the same. (Note: I get that an infant can't use a regular seat belt.) It's true that car seats have been great for safety. But a lot of that (if not most) is that it forced parents to put their kids in the back seat of the car (much safer) in most cases and always secured by a belt. The idea that a newer car seat has some magic safety improvement that is say, more important then the difference in safety between a mini-van and a two seat sportscar is a fallacy. If you are worried about your kid being safe in a car, put them in a minivan and have them sit in a car seat in the middle back. Even with an old car seat that is very safe.

drtillberg 7y ago
For families with 3 children, the child car seat requirement generally pushes them into a minivan because you can't install car seats 3 to a row, so you need an extra row. And then you still max out at 1 friend instead of 3, because even a minivan won't seat more than 4 child car seats. It's also not magic getting your children into a car seat. It takes time, the angles are awkward, and when parked on a busy road it often exposes parents to traffic. I've only heard of 1 fatal accident through where a parent was struck by a car (sideswiped) while fiddling with a car seat.
- mrfusion 7y ago
  I have a crazy theory that car sizes (and prices) are what are limiting the number of children people have. It would be ridiculous to try to transport a five child family these days.
  - jtbayly 7y ago
    The USA is economically oppressive to larger families in many ways like this.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    I would go with lack of parental leave, decreasing income security, stagnating wages, student loan debt, enormous healthcare expenses, and need for dual income households as well as being in school for longer periods of time to secure good jobs over car sizes and prices. Not to mention minivans exist and aren’t that expensive compared to cars.
  - sjg007 7y ago
    Well you can buy a suburban and an eight passenger minivan.. they do still sell 15 passenger vans as well....
- jefftk 7y ago
  I often do three car seats in a row across the back of midsized cars like the Toyota Corolla. It's very tight, but it works. (You do need relatively compact seats; I'm using the cheapest Walmart seat)

sjg007 7y ago

Car seats are regulated by the Feds. They get recalled. If a second hand car seat is recalled it shouldn’t be sold etc...

jedimastert 7y ago

> Hahahaha. That would never happen. The optics would be horrible, both domestically and internationally. Such a good deed could never go unpunished. This is, I will point out, the same reason "expired" or almost "expired" produce and groceries get destroyed or thrown away instead of donated. In almost all cases the food is still perfectly safe, and most stores assume (incorrectly) that they would be liable for any illness caused by "expired" food. But the optics would also look terrible because most people just don't realize that food doesn't magically go from perfectly safe to toxic the instant it does beyond the date written on the package. I have a friend who runs a homeless charity and she tried to get the (many) grocery stored to donate constantly. Almost all of the chains have corporate policy against it for liability reasons.

newshorts 7y ago
I used to work at a shelter. We had an “in” with a local grocery store. They would throw the leftover food out by placing it in nicely on the back dock instead of the dumpster.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Places that forbid this tend to do so because it's the only way to cure rampant theft. "Oh, I thought that £500 of fresh rump steak was expired. Whoops. No, I have no idea how my old school friend happened to know I'd made that mistake so as to arrive in a truck less than a minute after I carefully stacked the boxes of steak in the disposal area". For stuff with a Best Before rather than Use By tag all the cheaper stores I use just mark it down. Crisps that "expired" two months ago probably aren't as crisp as they intended (moisture in the outside air will very slowly penetrate even the metalized foil container) but they're not dangerous, if your budget is tight maybe 50% off is a good deal on those crisps. For Use By stuff yeah, probably eating these cooked chicken slices on Tuesday after they expired on Monday won't kill me, but I get where they're coming from. It's about margin, just like on aircraft. If you're on a twin-engine jetliner and it loses the left engine in cruise, that plane is still fine, it was designed to handle the stress of maximum power take-off on a single engine every time. It could definitely still go to your destination. But it won't - it's completely understandable that we always treat that plane as an emergency and try to get it down immediately for the sake of safety margin.

charles_f 7y ago

> But the drugs aren't actually expired, and they're certainly not used Note that author is referring to used car seats, not expired ones. Comparing used car seats to used drugs is not very fair. A closer sense for "used" when referring to a car seat compared to what "used" means for a drug would probably be one that was involved in a crash, and that is not what the article is mentioning. But to your point this won't happen. Besides the supply chain nightmare and risks if the seats were effectively involved in a crash, that would make the whole campaign moot: how do you justify why you should throw a used car seat away and then send it to another country? And we most certainly don't want that if the goal is to sell AMAP car seats

NullPrefix 7y ago

>defective designs [...] don't linger too long Shouldn't defective designs be recalled right away instead of at expiration date?

ovi256 7y ago
Customers don't comply 100% with a safety recall. This reduced manufacturer liability by reducing the lingering.
bluGill 7y ago
If it is past the expiration date they don't have to recall it at all. Saves a lot of money when nearly every car seat ever made was recalled at some point (or so it seems - as a parent every carseat I've ever bought has been recalled at some time within 5 years).

2rsf 7y ago

> they often retain their potency for many years after the supposed expiration date With the exception of few drugs that do go bad "often" is not good enough, AFAIU it's a statistical game of certainties- I want to be X% certain that the drug has Y% of its potency

Mountain_Skies 7y ago

>Hahahaha. That would never happen. The optics would be horrible, both domestically and internationally. Such a good deed could never go unpunished. A university I worked for had a partnership with a nearby inner city elementary school. University employees did a lot of volunteer work for the elementary school, everything from weekend landscaping to weekday reading for storytime. When we upgraded a lab full of computers, we donated the older computers to the elementary school. Reinstalled the OS and productivity software, set up the network, and did all the work on physical placement, even cleaned the storage room being turned into a computer lab. These weren't obsolete machines, they just weren't cutting edge. Two weeks after the new computers were setup the local paper ran a front page (thankfully below the fold) article on how we had dumped junk computers on the school. All of the quotes from the teachers were anonymous but it was obvious they were upset they didn't get the newest toys to play with. The e-rate scandal a few years previous hit the school and others like it pretty hard so until then they were accustomed to getting everything new-in-box. The principal did call the university to apologize and express gratitude for the computers but the damage to the university's public image and the partnership between the schools was already done. The volunteer work continued but it faded out over the next couple of years.

martin_a 7y ago
The company I'm working for is in the food industry. We used to give away overproduction and returns (returned for "print on the packaging is not 100% on point" nothing wrong with the goods) to local kindergartens and schools and clubs and whoever asked for free. We stopped that after people were complaining that their received goods did not have a good print or that the print somehow was "off-topic" or whatever. Now everything that gets returned is going straight to the trash.

CoolGuySteve 7y ago

What bothers me more about "expiry" of car seats is that this logic isn't applied to other toys. My parents gave me some Duplos from the 80s. After looking it up, the red and yellow bricks contained unsafe levels of cadmium. Legos are often advertised as being lifetime toys that can be passed down but this just isn't true. I'd like to see mandatory UPC codes etched into toys/car seats/strollers so that they can be identified for recalls. That way this nonsense about 'expiry' of otherwise durable goods can stop while overall safety improves.

gnode 7y ago
Going beyond the obvious motive of child car seat manufacturers wanting to undermine the second-hand market, I expect design flaws could also play a part. In case there is a flaw, e.g. poisons; unexpected decay of material strength; mold growth, then it's good to reduce the number of the old product around in case it's discovered, and a lawsuit manifests. Possibly the expiration could even mitigate damages in case of liability. While superfluous product expiry is generally useful for selling more of any kind of product, a safety device for children is exactly the kind of product where mitigating liability from latent design flaws would be desirable for a manufacturer.

turk73 7y ago

As soon as you have kids you recognize a pattern: Every car seat, stroller, high chair, and crib gets recalled. Every single one. The companies want to eliminate the secondary market for these products and they are damn good at it using lawyers. This is massive bullshit and it contributes to a massive waste stream. It is a big reason why having a family is so damned un-affordable. What if cars expired? I used the same hand me down car seats for both my kids. I also bought one actual car seat of the larger variety at one point because the technology actually did improve some. The booster seats chap my hide--an uncomfortable hunk of plastic for a kid to sit on so I can be legally compliant but are a stone-cold bitch for the kid to sit on during long car rides. As soon as my kids looked big enough I tossed those booster seats in the trash where they belong. It is all safety meddling by a bunch of busy-body twats who either have a profit motive or just enjoy authoritarianism. It is the same mindset that gave us Prohibition. Saving us from ourselves only to create a much bigger problem in the long run. How many times have we seen that play out? Alcohol (we sort of of fixed that one, yay), drugs (cartels--been to Mexico lately?), healthcare (the costs, my word!) , automobiles (how many more airbags do we need?), student loans (but everyone should be able to go to college and become debt slaves), housing bubble (everyone should be able to afford to buy their own home), you name it, the meddlers have wrecked it. I pretty much lay all of it at the feet of do-gooding Democrats, but I know that Republicans are equally to blame because they do it for banker profit motive reasons rather than misguided altruism.