Retailers Must Take Responsibility for Product Safety, CPSC says

Amidst the seemginly endless toy recalls this past year, one question remains unanswered: who is ultimately responsible for ensuring the quality of consumer products in the United States? The head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Nancy Nord, is pointing to retailers. Chronically underfunded and increasingly understaffed, it’s almost impossible for the CPSC to inspect all the imports coming in from overseas. Instead, Nord hopes to focus the CPSC on domestic-made goods, as the agency was intended to do, and leave inspection of imported goods up to retailers like Wal-Mart. What do you think: who should be responsible for these products? Do retailers like Wal-Mart have any responsibility to ensure the quality of the goods they sell?

Safety Push Focuses on Retailers [Wall Street Journal]

Retailers may come under increased scrutiny from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the agency’s acting chairman said yesterday.

Nancy Nord said the shift in strategy is necessary because many of the 15,000 household products regulated by the agency are made abroad, not in the U.S. as most were when the agency was created in 1973. At that time, most of the agency’s enforcement efforts were focused on product manufacturers.

Amidst the seemginly endless toy recalls this past year, one question remains unanswered: who is ultimately responsible for ensuring the quality of consumer products in the United States? The head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Nancy Nord, is pointing to retailers.

Until now, the agency “has focused on product manufacturers, and not an awful lot of attention to retailers and making sure that retailers understood their responsibility. But with the big-box retailers coming in, that focus has changed,” she said.

A spokesman for the retail industry expressed some surprise at her remarks about the agency’s stepped-up enforcement of stores and distributors. “We agree that retailers have a role to play in all this but it is not the same sort of role as the manufacturer,” said Erik Autor, vice president and international trade counsel for the National Retail Federation, a trade group.

“The primary responsibility has to fall on the manufacturer,” he said. “Our view is that the most effective point to enforce and determine safety is at the point of manufacture. It is too late at the point of sale.”

Ms. Nord, however, cited a 2005 agreement with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nation’s largest retailer by revenue, that requires the Bentonville, Ark., company to report detailed data on product-safety complaints to the agency and share it with suppliers. The effort is aimed at improving product safety, especially of foreign-made goods, including toys, more than 80% of which are made overseas.

Ms. Nord also announced plans for expanding inspection of imported goods using new funds appropriated by Congress. The plans include, for the first time, posting full-time inspectors at some of the nation’s busiest ports including Long Beach, Calif., and Seattle, and implementing a new import-tracking surveillance system in cooperation with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Ms. Nord said the inspections would target high-risk products such as toys, fireworks and electrical equipment, and suspect shipments.

As concerns about the safety of goods from China in particular reached a zenith in 2007, with recalls of millions of units of children’s toys and jewelry, several bills were introduced in Congress aimed at improving the safety of imported consumer products. Criticism of the agency and Ms. Nord mounted, with some Democratic members of Congress calling for her resignation.

In December, the House passed the first significant legislation overhauling the agency in nearly a generation on the last day of session. A Senate committee approved a bill that consumer advocates consider tougher, but it remains in committee. Meanwhile, Congress approved an additional $80 million for the beleaguered agency, which has 400 staff members.

Ms. Nord suggested that some of the media reports about product safety last year approached “hysteria,” and said the fact that the number of recalls had increased from 467 in fiscal year 2006 to 472 in 2007 was a sign that the agency was doing its job by effectively removing defective and dangerous products from the shelves.

Rachel Weintraub, an advocate for the Consumer Federation of America, who attended the speech by Ms. Nord at the National Press Club, said “acknowledging the need for the agency to change is positive” but that she was “disappointed” the agency chief seemed to suggest that product-safety concerns were overblown.

Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Tuesday, January 08, 2008