Recalled Toys Still on Sale at Wal-Mart
Apparently you have to pry recalled merchandise from Wal-Mart’s cold, dead fingers before it stops trying to sell it to unsuspecting customers. See also: Nazi t-shirts.
Groups say dangerous toys still on store shelves [CNN Money]
Tests conducted on some toys and other children’s products sold recently at Wal-Mart, Target and Toys “R” Us stores were found to contain dangerously high levels of lead, consumer interest groups said Thursday.
The Clean Water Action, a Washington-based non-profit firm, said it tested 50 children’s toys sold at those retailers and at Walgreens stores in Massachusetts in late September.
The CWA said 11 of those toys - some of which were made out of vinyl - contained lead, including two that contained “extremely high levels of lead.”
The U.S. toy industry is reeling from a string of toy recalls this year. Over the summer, after toymakers Mattel and RC2 Corp. recalled millions of popular toys that were found to contain lead, a substance that can result in poisoning in young children if ingested.
Read the rest of this story ...
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Thursday, September 27 | 15 comments | Permalink
Mattel: China Not To Blame for Recalled Toys
Mattel apologized to China for blaming the country for recent toy recalls. Being careful not to bite the hand that feeds it, Mattel took full responsibility for the recalls and apologized to “the Chinese people, and all of our customers who received the toys.” Why is Mattel making such a fuss about taking full responsibility? It almost seems like the company’s taking the fall for someone else…
The real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us “every day low prices.” It’s the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. [Fast Company]
U.S.-based toy giant Mattel Inc. issued an extraordinary apology to China today over the recall of Chinese-made toys, taking the blame for design flaws and saying it had recalled more lead-tainted toys than justified.
The gesture by Thomas A. Debrowski, Mattel’s executive vice president for worldwide operations, came in a meeting with Chinese product safety chief Li Changjiang, at which Li upbraided the company for maintaining weak safety controls.
“Our reputation has been damaged lately by these recalls,” Debrowski told Li in a meeting at Li’s office at which reporters were allowed to be present.
“And Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologizes personally to you, the Chinese people, and all of our customers who received the toys,” Debrowski said.
Read the rest of this story ...
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Friday, September 21 | 0 comments | Permalink
E.U. Deems “Made in China” Unsafe
European toy companies prove that manufacturing products with unsafe matierals in dangerous conditions are NOT prerequisites for staying profitable. If that’s the case, why does Wal-Mart still choose to outsource the majority of its products to countries where these conditions still exist?
In Europe, Some Toy Makers Shun the China Label [New York Times]
Playmobil of Germany has long promoted its colorful plastic pirates, firefighters and farm animals as better-than-your-average plaything — toys to be handed down rather than chewed up. Now it can add another selling point: they are made in Europe, not China.
Attila Britting building models at Brandstätter in Bavaria. The company, maker of Playmobil toys, has passed on a move to China.
The same goes for Lego, the Danish maker of toy bricks, and for Ravensburger, a German puzzle and game manufacturer, though it does produce small quantities of nonpaper toys in Chinese factories.With Mattel and the American toy industry reeling from recalls of millions of Chinese-made toys, most because of lead paint, some of Europe’s best-known toy makers find themselves in the fortuitous position of having bucked an industrywide trend of moving production to China.
“Looking back, it feels like it was right to make that decision,” said Andrea Schauer, managing director of Geobra Brandstätter, which makes Playmobil toys. “At the level of quality we need,” she said, “we didn’t have enough manpower to inspect factories in China.”
Read the rest of this story ...
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Tuesday, September 18 | 27 comments | Permalink
New Product Idea: E-Z Test Tainted Toys Kit
Apparently, there’s an entire junior chemistry set’s worth of chemicals in the paint coating Wal-Mart’s pet toys.
Wal-Mart Reviewing Results of Tests on China-Made Pet Toys [Consumer Affairs]
Wal-Mart said today that it’s reviewing the laboratory results on two Chinese-made pet toys sold at its stores that—according to a forensic toxicologist whose company tested the products for ConsumerAffairs.com—contain elevated levels of lead, chromium, and cadmium.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission—which says it needs more money to protect consumers—did not respond to our inquiries, either last week or today.
And a pet owner in Michigan called on consumers to stop buying pet toys that are made in China.
ConsumerAffairs.com hired ExperTox Analytical Laboratory in Texas to test four Chinese-made pet toys—two for dogs and two for cats—for heavy metals and other toxins.
One of the dog toys—a latex one that looks like a green monster—tested positive for what the lab’s toxicologist said are high levels of lead and the cancer producing agent chromium.
A cloth catnip toy also tested positive for “a tremendous amount” of the toxic metal cadmium.
Read the rest of this story ...
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Tuesday, September 18 | 3 comments | Permalink
C-SPAN Coverage of Congressional Toy Safety Hearings
Click to watch C-SPAN’s full coverage of yesterday’s Congressional hearing on toy safety.
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Thursday, September 13 | 0 comments | Permalink
Fact Sheet: Congressional Toy Safety Hearings
As Congressional hearings commence to investigate the dangerous Chinese toy recalls, the House and Senate are calling some of the industry’s largest players to testify about their roles in the process. Mattel, Toys “R” Us, the Toy Industry Association and others are all testifying at a U.S. Senate hearing on “Toy Safety Standards.” But we won’t hear from the biggest name of all—Wal-Mart—which has used is political power to shift blame to suppliers and avoid taking responsibility for its role in the massive toy recall scandal.
Wal-Mart recently launched its “toy safety net” program, but it is noticeably vague on testing requirements and details. While the public focus is currently on lead paint, many recalls have occurred due to other hazards. In addition, Wal-Mart’s primary testing laboratory, Consumer Testing Laboratories, lacks both NRTL and A2LA accreditations, is headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, and by all accounts, gets 80-90% of its business from Wal-Mart. Can it really be considered third party “independent testing?”
It is also well-known in the industry that most toys for the holidays are already on the way to Wal-Mart stores or in its warehouses. [Inbound Logistics, November 2006; Honolulu Advertiser, 9/9/07]
Wal-Mart’s plan to require manufacturers to re-submit testing certifications for existing toys is unrealistic if such documentation did not exist initially. Will Wal-Mart really refuse to put those products on the shelves without the documents? That seems unlikely.
Click here to download the fact sheet (PDF).
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Thursday, September 13 | 11 comments | Permalink
Toy Problems are Deep-Rooted, Industry-Wide
While toymakers testify before Congress, the writers at Slate.com opine that new safety measures will do little to make toys less dangerous so long as the toy industry’s business model remains unchanged.
The problem, say the small fry, is how the big guys make toys. They outsource everything, and their contractors rely on subcontractors, who rely on other subcontractors to sell them goods. There’s a reason the Toy Manufacturers of America changed their name to the Toy Industry Association in 2001—many of their members no longer manufacture toys, and they rarely do so in America. When a multibillion dollar company like Mattel has such an attenuated supply chain, you can be sure that a measly $63 million regulatory agency like CPSC has little idea what’s going on. And when it does, there’s not much it can do (even if the officials in charge want to, which lately, they haven’t). Requiring third-party testing won’t mean that CPSC has the money or the will to enforce it.
Last week, the Toy Industry Association, which represents the country’s big toy makers, announced that it wanted the government to impose mandatory safety-testing standards on all toys. While this is a good first step, given the industry’s checkered past (forgive me), the sudden hankering for regulation is suspect. The reason so many toys were recalled this summer is not that there weren’t enough regulations. It’s that toy makers were ignoring the regulations that are already on the books. And the new testing proposal won’t stop them from continuing to do so.
It is already illegal for manufacturers to sell toys with lead and small parts. There is also a law that requires companies to tell regulators within 24 hours if they discover one of their products is defective or dangerous. And yet big toy companies dispute this. In a move that is certain to earn him a spot in the CEO Chutzpah Hall of Fame, Mattel’s top executive, Robert Eckert, told the Wall Street Journal last week that he disagrees with the 24-hour requirement. His company eventually passes on the information, Eckert said, but “vagaries in the law” allow him to decide exactly when.
Read the rest of this story ...
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Wednesday, September 12 | 0 comments | Permalink
You Get What You Pay For…and Pay For and Pay For and Pay For
This piece from the Huffington Post expounds the fact that doing things the cheapest way doesn’t always mean saving money. Had Wal-Mart invested enough to ensure its products were safe (and allowed manufacturers enough budget to use higher-quality materials), the company would have saved millions of dollars in legal fees, emergency public relations fixes, and labor costs.
Wal-Mart might love to advertise with that little smiley-face knocking the prices down, but when they had to remove those toys with toxic paint from their shelves, remember: a frown is just a smile upside-down.
The High Cost of Low Cost [Huffington Post]
A successful freelancer once explained to me that he regularly tells companies who balk at paying his price, “If you think I’m expensive, wait until you work with amateurs.” Lower-quality work will invariably cause big problems and much more money spent correcting them.
This is far more basic than Economics 101. It’s nothing more than a wise saying everyone learned in grade school.
You Get What You Pay For.
Usually, that’s said with a shrug and a wistful smile. But then, we generally don’t expect the payment to be made with people’s lives.
Save money by not doing required repairs on a bridge. It collapses, causing devastation and death. The original price to fix the bridge was $3 million. The financial cost only of replacement and economic upheaval is an estimated $500 million.
Save money by cutting $65 million from required maintenance on levees. They’re breached, wiping out a major American city and killing 1,577 people.. The cost of rebuilding the levees is $10 billion. Rebuilding the city is an additional $53 billion.
Save money by having your toys made cheaply overseas. Toxic paint is found in 21 million products for children, in three separate recalls.
Read the rest of this story ...
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Wednesday, September 12 | 55 comments | Permalink
View Wal-Mart Watch's videos on YouTube