Amazon failed to adequately alert more than 300,000 customers to serious risks—including death and electrocution—that US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) testing found with more than 400,000 products that third parties sold on its platform.
The CPSC unanimously voted to hold Amazon legally responsible for third-party sellers’ defective products. Now, Amazon must make a CPSC-approved plan to properly recall the dangerous products—including highly flammable children’s pajamas, faulty carbon monoxide detectors, and unsafe hair dryers that could cause electrocution—which the CPSC fears may still be widely used in homes across America.
While Amazon scrambles to devise a plan, the CPSC summarized the ongoing risks to consumers:
If the [products] remain in consumers’ possession, children will continue to wear sleepwear garments that could ignite and result in injury or death; consumers will unwittingly rely on defective [carbon monoxide] detectors that will never alert them to the presence of deadly carbon monoxide in their homes; and consumers will use the hair dryers they purchased, which lack immersion protection, in the bathroom near water, leaving them vulnerable to electrocution.
Instead of recalling the products, which were sold between 2018 and 2021, Amazon sent messages to customers that the CPSC said “downplayed the severity” of hazards.
In these messages—“despite conclusive testing that the products were hazardous” by the CPSC—Amazon only warned customers that the products “may fail” to meet federal safety standards and only “potentially” posed risks of “burn injuries to children,” “electric shock,” or “exposure to potentially dangerous levels of carbon monoxide.”
Typically, a distributor would be required to specifically use the word “recall” in the subject line of these kinds of messages, but Amazon dodged using that language entirely. Instead, Amazon opted to use much less alarming subject lines that said, “Attention: Important safety notice about your past Amazon order” or “Important safety notice about your past Amazon order.”
Amazon then left it up to customers to destroy products and explicitly discouraged them from making returns. The e-commerce giant also gave every affected customer a gift card without requiring proof of destruction or adequately providing public notice or informing customers of actual hazards, as can be required by law to ensure public safety.
Further, Amazon’s messages did not include photos of the defective products, as required by law, and provided no way for customers to respond. The commission found that Amazon “made no effort” to track how many items were destroyed or even do the minimum of monitoring the “number of messages that were opened.”
we went from the amazon is burning to i am burning because of amazon
Rossmann did a review a few months ago of electrical fuses on Amazon. Very few of these electrical safety devices worked as advertised.
Yup and the all negative reviews are inexplicably removed.
If any physical store got a dangerous product, was made undeniably aware of the danger and continued to sell the product - they’d be in a lot of trouble.
I straight up wouldn’t trust Amazon for any electrical safety device. Go to a hardware store or parts distributor.
Even a surge protector from a reputable brand could be suspect - Amazon lets counterfeit products on the storefront all the time, and most sellers barely list any specifications on product pages.
Just do not buy random non brand stuff? A Fluke multimeter will work the same regardless where you buy it.
Counterfeits apply to all stores. The local store in no way has the capability or knowledge to identify them. On Amazon I could at least get reviews to tell me about it.
In any case, testing is better than believing, regardless of anything else.
Local stores are more likely to get their product from reputable suppliers (yes, this varies) - on Amazon, you’re buying from whoever unless you specifically seek out an official store, if it exists. Also, Fluke has been posting about counterfeits for years; here is a post from 6 months ago, which would suggest it’s an ongoing issue.
Here is a 2021 post from Electrician Talk about electricians receiving multimeters that don’t ohm out correctly (kind of a big fucking deal). Additionally, if you buy products on Amazon from an unauthorized seller, even if the product works fine the warranty is generally void.
Edit: Also, to be pedantic, a multimeter isn’t an electrical safety device; I’m using that term to refer to protective devices like fuses, GFCIs, AFCIs, breakers, thermal overloads, etc.
One of the biggest trust issues is that you literally cannot buy a product from a trusted seller.
If 20 sellers sell the same item, Amazon will pool all of those items at their warehouses and ship them to buyers regardless of which seller the buyer was told they were buying from. If one seller provides Amazon with a counterfeit product, every seller is now tainted with that product.
And if you complain, the site treats it as a mark against the seller, even though they destroyed any evidence of whether the seller was responsible or not by shuffling the items in inventory.
I’m not racist… BUT… I will not buy any product until I thoroughly look through the item description, seller profile, and determine that the seller is not a secret shop from some place in China. It’s so quickly slapped together and much of the time, terrible products. I get it. It’s Chinese and they go after speed over quality, but like… Anytime I’ve ever had an issue, the seller was always based in China.
This is true, but also on the flip side, if you find your Nintendo DS Lite from almost 2 decades ago, and look at it, and the battery hasn’t turned spicy yet and you look on the battery and see it was made in China… it’s pretty impressive.
The cheap shit on Amazon however, yeah I wouldn’t trust it tbh.
My DSi’s battery swelled up and nearly exploded less than a decade after getting it. Still have the DSi, but no battery.
Only time I ever trust them is when it’s a verified shop from a highly reputable company like Seagate, but even then I don’t trust Amazon.
Worst thing about buying a budget phone, like I’ve done for my past 3 phones, is that phone stores never have good cases and the only place to find good (as in my phone won’t be destroyed when dropped, case isn’t slippery, and case won’t be destroyed in a week) is Amazon. So I’ve been essentially locked into buying cheap Chinese phone cases there because lack of options for anything that isn’t the newest flagship phone model.
No idea which phone you have, but dbrand does carry a decent amount of models. However, it is mostly limited to Apple, Google, Samsung, and One Plus. It does suck trying to find some things though. I do try to get things directly from the manufacturer website when it makes sense, but sometimes Amazon IS their website.
Can’t wait for them to be hit with their 0.1% fine.
As is tradition.
The issue isn’t the fine. Amazon is breaking numerous federal laws by not managing what is being shipped by 3rd party sellers. They are violating several FAA regulations on thousands of packages daily. At some point they will have to put a plan in place to vet these packages and that will be EXTREMELY costly. We will see a dramatic shift in how Amazon does business in the near future.
Is it more costly than buying a senator or two? Cause I bet we’ll NOT see any major changes that could cost them real money.
When I was a kid I thought that clearly understandable things (punishment is intended to prevent doing something again, that is, to clearly undo the benefit for the criminal ; best of all be worth twice that benefit ; if not, then those issuing punishment are clearly corrupt, and the punishment should be reconsidered, and they should be removed from power and investigated ; and so on through all the chain) not being met will be seen and violently protested, but later I learned what gaslighting is!
Say, legalism is gaslighting. As in “you should fight evil only by the law which is made by that evil, and you should only consider that law not a law when you’ve managed to remove it by the rules made by evil”.
Any other thing which says “things are normal, no need to break stuff, everybody thinks it’s normal, you should too” is gaslighting.
We are a whole civilization gaslighted by parasites into not crushing them.
Where is the list of products? It’s gotta be online somewhere.
See that is the real issue here. They did not recall them. They did not list them. They did not it seems stop selling them.
The suit seems to be about the fact they did not do what they where supposed to. This is the time when we get to see if our governments have any ability to govern anymore.
That’s insane. I have some old Amazon basics surge protectors… I guess I need to assume they are a risk.
I stopped buying this sort of thing a decade or so ago, but I don’t see a date here…
I guess none of us should trust any of their products if they aren’t going to tell us which ones are dangerous.
