Family sues Amazon after hoverboard fire destroys $1M house
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
Amazon is known to be a disgusting swampy wasteland of intentionally deceptive knockoff garbage. Their warehouse policy of arbitrarily mixing stock is actively customer hostile in practice, and they know it, and they do nothing about it.
But that's not the interesting part. Consumer public need assurance that what they're being sold, NOT what they're buying, is safe. The difference is perspective. Regardless of provenance, it should never be the buyer's responsibility to gamble correctly on product safety.
Three-pin appliances require a ground to be safe. By using a power strip like this, you're creating an unsafe configuration with a high risk of electric shock if there's a fault with an appliance.
Also, the little figure-8 connectors can't pass a high amount of current safely, and lots of 3-pin appliances are relatively high draw. That's a fire risk.
I'm not sure who's responsible for the enforcement in the US.
I presume in the USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Consumer_Product_Safety_C... would get involved or the FDA.
Can you elaborate on this?
My MacBook charger has both a two-prong and a three-prong cable. Why would it be any more dangerous to plug my MacBook into this power strip using the three-prong cable than to connect it directly to the wall with the two-prong cable?
However, there is also this: http://i.imgur.com/ftPT7sC.png, which grounds from either sides or in the middle for sockets like these http://i.imgur.com/FnXMndC.png
The charger looks like this: https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare...
And also comes with a longer, three-prong cable that replaces the little two-prong piece: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/like/172352962036?lpid=116&chn=ps
The grounding pin does have a use, though: some cheap powered USB devices will put out a voltage relative to ground on their '0v' lines. If you touch a MacBook that's plugged into one of these devices, you can get a small shock. If you're using a 3-pin adapter, this doesn't seem to happen.
I know that it offers no grounding, that's a risk I have no choice but to take on my equipment because my building is not grounded. So I'm not sure someone selling a strip like that would be fined if my landlord isn't even forced to ground the building.
* Replace the wiring with grounded cable. Expensive.
* Replace the outlet with a GFCI and label it "no equipment ground". Gives most of the safety benefits of a proper ground, and is up to code. Not that expensive.
* Use a cheater plug [1] and connect the external ground tab to a pipe or something else grounded.
What you're asking for is basically a cheater plug plus an ordinary power strip, sold as one integrated unit. Better to keep them separate so that people know what they're dealing with. Also, what the poster upthread was describing didn't have a grounding tab, so there was no way to hook it up safely.
(The landlord isn't required to set up grounded outlets out of a general principle that you only need to bring things up to code when you're modifying it, and that something that was legal at the time it was installed stays so. Your unit could legally have knob-and-tube wiring if it's old enough!)
So, it's likely that you have Line and Neutral connected, while Ground is "floating" (not connected). Which means that, if something goes wrong inside the appliance, it can be dangerous for other appliances, and more importantly for you, too.
Especially if there are exterior metal parts inside the appliance that are grounded and a wire is touching the metal from the inside, too.
Is it that plugging multiple 3-prong devices into one power strip would connect their grounds together, and if one has a short they all go hot?
Of course, lots of people mis-use them, and when they do they're unsafe. I assume they're still on sale because they have a safe and appropriate use.
EDIT: I, personally, would never have one of the linked adapters in my house, simply because the risk of someone being an idiot with it without realising is too great. (I also come from the UK, where our plug and socket designs are nothing less than straight up paranoid when it comes to safety, and the US electrical setup seems unnecessarily risky to me. At least it's lower voltage...)
There isn't a "warehouse policy" per se. As a seller, you can choose "Stickerless commingled inventory" as an alternative to individually barcode labelling each item before you ship it to the Amazon warehouse (or paying Amazon a handsome premium to label them for you).
The risk as a seller is that your items are commingled with counterfeit equivalents, and that your seller reputation could be affected as a result.
Perhaps being held accountable for it will cause a change in policy. It's about time.
But actually that's nothing. Searching "cable" gives me 40 pages of results all with the same basic jug plug image.
What brought me to use Amazon a long time ago was that they were selling themselves. It was one of the first reputable seller on the internet, that soon sold all kind of stuff. It was much better than buying from a dozen of unknown weird sites (depending on the product) for which I didn't have an account.
Now it's mayhem. There is no guarantee who is selling the thing, where it's coming from or what is the product I'm buying BUT everything is advertised as AMAZON.com.
I might as well buy stuff on eBay. At least it's clear who's selling.
Amazon banned Hoverboards from their site on Dec 12, 2015.
The family kept using the board despite this.
The house fire was on Jan 9, 2016.
Amazon announced full refunds on Jan 21, 2016.
The CPSC put out a warning on Jul 6, 2016.
The legal claim makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of Dec 12, 2015, and why the family kept using the board.
Amazon did not notify customers on Dec 12, 2015, only Jan 21, 2016. But this was all over the media - it was the lead story on the nightly news.
I get that this is pretty horrible for them, but I'm not convinced Amazon acted negligently here.
Amazon acted pretty quickly. How could they know ahead of time the boards would be dangerous? In between Dec 12 and Jan 21 it seemed they were trying to find good boards and get information - it doesn't seem like an excessive amount of time to do that.
But would it have been that difficult to generate a warning email (if not also surface mail to the ship-to address) to every buyer of an affected product after the 12/12 ban, given that they had all needed data immediately handy?
At that time it seemed like they felt they could find the good hoverboards among the bad (hence their program of asking for certification). Only later did they realize all of them were bad.
Stop 10 random people on the street 5-8 won't know about the Samsung note exploding....
amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013US9FFY/ref=oh_aui_sear...
etl warning mark is fake: http://www.intertek.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=34359...
Unbelievable.
Don't buy anything that converts ac/dc, anything you eat, or any cosmetics from amazon.
You should mention that it's a safety issue and use this verbiage: "Could you pull the Andon cord for this ASIN?"
The amount of fake product complaints I see in reviews on Amazon now is pretty incredible. They really need to figure something out with regard to controlling their inventory.
Uh, also, why is this article playing a 53 second jazzy soundtrack? Is this a new method of fighting off adblockers? You're gonna throw me nice jams instead of your video? I'm down.
www.gannett-cdn.com/360player/comscore/streamsense.5.1.1.160316.min.js:8 getClip() is deprecated. Use getPlaylist().getClip() instead.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/27/457404184/episo...
It used to be fairly obvious which was a "third party seller" and which was Amazon (as in one company that sourced manufacturer products, bought them and shipped them). These days I basically click through to purchase and try to guess from the amount of P&P if they are Amazon, fulfilled by Amazon or some guy in his garage.
And why can't fulfilled by Amazon actually be on the product description !
This is another example of Internet enabling business models that law and society have not quite kept up with. Amazon probably don't have a strategy of confuse the shit out of the customer, but they can twist their business model so many times that's what has happened.
That’s weird. In the UK it absolutely is: you can tell on the product page whether you’re buying something sold by Amazon themselves or "fulfilled by Amazon". Items sold by Amazon have the text "Dispatched from and sold by Amazon" in the product description whereas an item from another seller will contain the text "Sold by <seller name> and Fulfilled by Amazon" or "Dispatched from and sold by <seller name>".
EU consumer regulation is notoriously stricter than in the US, so maybe it’s a legal requirement?
Why some searche results have the Seller list on the LHS and some don’t I’ve no idea.
The only question is whether this will lead to a more booming underground economy for folks who are more risk friendly.
AFAICT - with these items, a seller can send them in bulk to an Amazon warehouse and they'll all be put into the same box. So, a (for example) set of Sennheiser headphones sold by Amazon themselves can be in the same box as a fake set sold by a third-party seller, as long as the EAN is the same.
I've had this previously with Sennheiser headphones - sold by Amazon, on their site, and I got the fakes. I just didn't think about the idea of it including items where the fakes were unsafe.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId...
I used to really appreciate Amazon, but in the last couple of years it's become a bad joke.
Plot twist: It was the genuine Samsung product...
I don't understand how 'destroyed a 1mil house' turns into 30mil. This "pay for the immaterial damage you've done" (assuming that the 1mil contains most of the furniture etc. and that the rest of their belongings don't come close to 29mil dollars) attitude is strange, hard to grasp here.
In places like France, you can't sue for 30M, but you can maybe sue for what you lost. At the same time, the criminal laws are more likely to affect corporations via regulations and even legal action. Thus, the philosophy in the US is, less government regulation, more emphasis on non governmental interference in private entities working out their differences with the government only as impartial judge.
Hence it's very important for individual consumers that we be able to sue for these ridiculous sums. It's the only disincentive for the Amazons and other powerhouse corporations from getting away with such things as a fire caused by negligence, and their writing it off as a business expense. The expense needs to be high.
a) isn't "replace 1mil+ for a product that costs 100" (pulled that number from thin air, no clue what these things cost) already punitive? The replacement cost eats the profit for a HUGE number of sales already, no?
b) the arguments for the _specific_ number seem completely arbitrary and scaling in ways I cannot understand. It's not "our home was destroyed, pay to replace it and pay for another house on top, because we have to replace all the stuff inside and the experience was crazy". It's "our home was destroyed, pay us enough to buy 2 dozen of these homes with a lot of room to make every single one of these 24 homes look nice as well".
That scales in ways that are utterly alien to me. If you can somehow defend your request for 30mil, why not 50? 100? As soon as you enter 'emotional damage' (hard to quantify) or punitive damages (the more the better, right?) I fail to see how you come up with these numbers.
Then again, I'm not saying it's silly. It's just completely confusing for me and I DO feel better about the local system. It is an entirely different culture and I'm trying to point this out in a thread that so far is full of "Yeah, makes sense" posts. Internationally it might not be that one sided.
Otherwise anyone can manufacture explosive broken fire-trigerring devices. There's no point of making a device 'safe' if a $1 device can't pay back more than $1. The only incentive is to make stuff cheap, ignore safety, risks and regulation.
If the manufacturer must close, so be it. Better that than dead people.
b) The scale is American. They sue for very high amount (higher than just the reimbursement), as the previous poster was explaining.
I brought up the product price just because I feel that paying more than a million in damages for a product that costs (say..) 100 dollar is already punitive in terms of business. Whoever has to pay even 1 million probably will be quite unhappy about carrying that product, without any further inflation: The price for this accident eats the profit for a BIG number of sales - ignoring the PR issues.
So: Sure, if you sell a $1 device that causes $1,000,000 in damages, pay a million (or more). But paying a million (or more) caused by a $1 device seems already like a decent way to make the business .. reconsider some practices?
That's why there aren't many manufacturers in business and they are all big.
Even more so in the USA, because the law is retarded and people could sue for stupid reasons and win ^^
It seems that here the trick is to attack Amazon instead of the device manufacturer. The damages are scaled for Amazon size.
But .. I'm too ignorant to know WHAT the strategy is over here, how companies would be/are being reigned in. Homework.
Compensate the victims with amount equivalent to their loss(physical) + some decent compensation for emotional losses etc. But that need not be 30X of their actual loss. May be 2x or 3x. The rest of the punitive damages should be awarded to the regulatory body that can improve their oversight, or to a public research body that works on fire safety alarms/products etc for example, or to a public cause/charity that helps fire hazard victims or to a publicly funded affordable fire hazard insurance body etc. I see no need to award all the punitive damages to a single victim. This only encourages the 'sue first and for anything' behavior of the society.
It's actually similar to the manufacturer's side here.
As the poster above said, if the manufacturer doesn't have to pay more then the cost of the product, then there's no incentive for them to worry about safety, since they'll at most lose the cost of a product.
Similarly, if all a retailer has to worry about is losing the cost of a product line, then there isn't any incentive for them to care if the products they sell are safe: if one isn't, they just stop selling that line, and there's no reason for them to vet them ahead of time. But if they can lose more than a single product line 's worth of product, then they have to care that they're not selling dangerous junk.
For more on this, I suggest reading "Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader.
If 30 million isn't enough, what would be enough? "All the profit of this product"? "All the revenue based on this product"? And .. would you award that to some random party? Because that's what this is about as well, no? Someone was hurt (financially, emotionally) and now there's supposed to be a pay out. Would you suggest giving the "victims" 100 houses for the one house they lost? One party/family should be able to own a small village of luxury houses to hurt Amazon?
I'm going to retire from this thread - it's past midnight and I was confused a long time ago. Further arguments make this process only _more_ alien and I certainly don't want to convince the US population that they Should Not Do This.
But there's no way in hell to integrate this process with my upbringing - it feels entirely wrong and far too much like a cash grab. Chalk it up to cultural differences?
Let's summarize it thusly: the U.S. regulatory system, while not totally a free market, is a lot less stringent and red-tape-heavy than places like the EU. HOWEVER, you need a disincentive for 'bad actors' to cause harm, and in the U.S. we rely more on tort law ("wrongs") than in the EU, where things are more tightly regulated (in theory). It's a matter of degree. Rather than risk fines or even, in some cases, jail time, in the U.S. companies are afraid of getting sued, and thus you see all those 'don't put your finger in the socket' 'this knife is sharp, be careful' type notices on consumer products. The cultural aspect is around the idea that government shouldn't interfere overly in the market. The country was founded on the ideas of philosophers like Adam Smith.
If 30 million isn't enough, what would be enough? "All the profit of this product"? "All the revenue based on this product"? And .. would you award that to some random party? Because that's what this is about as well, no? Someone was hurt (financially, emotionally) and now there's supposed to be a pay out. Would you suggest giving the "victims" 100 houses for the one house they lost? One party/family should be able to own a small village of luxury houses to hurt Amazon?
Good question, and sometimes class action lawsuits (involving hundreds, or even thousands of people) happen. Note, the point of 'punitive' is punishiment. Disincentive. Don't do it again. It's up to lawyers / juries to 'decide' what the renumeration is. As to whom goes a bulk, well, you can rest assured law can be a lucrative profession for a reason.
if it is, I wonder how amazon can transition into having ebay levels of liability, and what that would entail.