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Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

"Amazon entered into a nationwide legally binding agreement to block the sale of children’s schools supplies and jewelry on Amazon.com without lab reports and other proof from the sellers that the products are not toxic."

IE Amazon can pass the buck completely to the sellers.

This will simultaneously make it expensive for those sellers actually trying to comply (lab testing is not cheap), and do nothing for those that were likely the problem in the first place (who will just fake lab results and do so at a lesser price)[1]

They should require amazon to randomly sample.

[1] In case you think this is not a real problem note that similar kinds of lab testing requirements destroyed, for example, children's toys except from large scale sellers who could afford the cost of compliance (see https://www.cpsc.gov/Business--Manufacturing/Business-Educat...). You will find basically no small manufacturers of childrens toys anymore. Different cause, but likely same effect.

I'm sure it made things safer in some sense, but yeah.

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> They should require amazon to randomly sample.

If governments cared about safety they would do the sampling and fine companies a meaningful percent of profit. That would fix these problems once and for all.

Unfortunately we’ve elected governments that cut regulations which encourages the opposite behavior from companies.

>Unfortunately we’ve elected governments that cut regulation

It's really not that simple. The regulations here benefit Amazon. This is why Facebook is asking to be regulated. It's called regulatory capture. It's a product of corporatism or cronyism. Established corporations lobby for regulations that shut out small business and protect their profits.

While I care a lot about having a competitive marketplace, it's much more important to me that I and my family aren't poisoned. Are you saying that smaller companies can't compete with Amazon if everyone has to check that they're not poisoning us?

>Are you saying that smaller companies can't compete with Amazon if everyone has to check that they're not poisoning us?

Yes, because this adds cost to manufacturing. Imagine if you yourself wanted to make and sell children's jewelry. How difficult would it be for you to get a lab to test all of the stuff you make? Could you make any money after you subtract the cost of these kinds of lab tests?

A large company has economies of scale. Finding a lab is a much smaller portion of the cost for them compared to you.

Well, I think most of us make due with just buying ingredients that aren't poisonous when we cook (with the assurance in part coming from independent quality control of said ingredients).

But I'm sure I must have missed why this general principle couldn't be used for other things that we don't want to be toxic.

But the whole argument is that buying parts/ingredients that aren't poisonous isn't enough. You still have to spend a lot of resources on testing. I think that these kinds of regulations should scale with the size of the company/revenue/profit. Smaller companies shouldn't have as great of a burden, so as to encourage competition. (There should still be punishments for them failing though. Eg you're not required to test if you're small, but you can still be punished for selling poisonous products.)

Most regions have prescribed safety standards to meet, for instance the kitemark or the CE mark (http://www.safekids.co.uk/toysafetymarks.html)[http://www.sa... show an item meets the regulatory safety requirements - these aren't added by stores, they are obtained by the manufacturer so that its products can be sold in stores across Britain and Europe.

Saying that the onus should be on stores is crazy, unless you accept that a company should have exclusive rights to your product at which point it become a licensed product and would probably be branded as such.

Oh, I completely agree that the onus shouldn't really be on the store. I was talking about manufacturers that sell it themselves.

Problem is even if you only use safe parts, legally you have to get a lab to test your product. Using lead free everything isn't enough to LEGALLY prove your product is lead free.

Smaller companies in the US would typically know not to put poison in their products in the first place, negating the need for direct lab testing, and those small companies can purchase bulk supplies from sources large enough to do upstream testing.

> Smaller companies in the US would typically know not to put poison in their products in the first place...

The catch is when they buy materials (like paint) that are cheaper because they don't comply. Either because they are made for a market with different regulations, or they have been contaminated some how.

Manufacturers may need to get certifications from suppliers about the materials meeting the regulations, but these won't be the cheapest option.

This is still a problem that could be solved by having governments that actually acted in the interest of their constituents and not just their cronies.

Product safety regulations and other regulations are really not the same thing. Please don't mix them. There's no such thing as regulatory capture by mandating that you aren't allowed to poison people.

Safety regulations that mandate expensive testing can absolutely be a part of regulatory capture. In well thought out regulations the benefits outweigh the costs, but being beneficial doesn't prevent a regulation from entrenching the big players.

This supposed “insight” is on its way to become just another tired meme. If, somehow, Amazon profits from this settlement, why did they not just implement its terms before? Or for other categories? There is nothing stopping them from requiring whatever lab tests they want from any seller they want, after all.

Regulatory capture is a useful concept, but please don’t just parrot it for any case related to regulation. As seen here, it is now used most often as a cudgel against any sort of regulation, and that’s exactly what they wanted all along.

It's not enough for Amazon to voluntarily adopt these measures, incurring costs only on themselves, but rather for the entire category/industry to be forced to implement these measures, incurring costs on everyone in the market. Even if the measures today are Amazon specific, the likely inexorable path is for this to become standard across the industry, which will eventually benefit those for whom the fixed cost portion can be spread across the largest amount of sales.

So we should just ignore the long list of cases where it has happened, because This Time It Will Be Different?

No, use it when appropriate. Here, it isn’t, because:

- this settlement applies to Amazon only, not any competitor. That doesn’t fit the usual mechanism of using regulation to shackle competition

- regulatory capture also refers to a social mechanism, where regulators become friends with the industry because they spend so much time together etc. That doesn’t fit too well here, because a state attorney’s office is far more diversified than, say, the FAA.

- the points in my initial comment, which you just ignored

I apologize, I was talking specifically about this:

>This supposed “insight” is on its way to become just another tired meme.

On the other hand, people were explicitly talking about regulation, which I took to mean as a wider-reaching thing than just this agreement Amazon made. In this specific case, Amazon is basically acting like the government for the sellers.

> they would do the sampling and fine companies a meaningful percent of profit

There is a role for a non-profit here to test products, publicise the results and potentially even bring cases to court against Amazon as a funding strategy. Barring that, propose a bill for your state watchdog to your state legislator. Waiting around for governments to care about random issues isn’t how any system works.

Or perhaps a for-profit. Make a living independently finding and bringing cases against companies selling illegal products.

Without tangible personal damages, would you have standing to sue?

Standard class action model. You find a few people who do have standing to sue and get them to agree to be represented by you.

> There is a role for a non-profit here to test products, publicise the results

Does Consumers' Union still do stuff like this?

In Brazil there is a national institution (INMETRO) that certifies almost every mass-produced item, with mandatory and voluntary categories, on a budget of ~US$100m/year.

School supplies are in the mandatory group, for obvious reasons.

They have some criticism from the international community: they are responsible for the official metrology (setting the standards), they regulate the products, they test it for compliance, they do the accreditation for other labs...

A good part of the incoming is from these tests and accreditation.

So, a good amount of conflict of interest.

On the flip side, it would be nice for suppliers to know their products are not toxic in the first place, rather than to just catch it after the harm is done.

This will act as a deterrent to catch those knowingly selling toxic products. But if lab testing isn't in the reach of suppliers, then how can they know if it's toxic free?

That said, I think a safety net is valuable, whether Amazon or government. It would be nice to see innovation to bring the cost of testing down so it's accessible to everyone.

Why isn't this a case for civil damages? Find toys that are dangerous and file a class action suit against Amazon for selling them? This would circumvent the whole "Giant corp bought the regulators so they won't fine them for poisoning kids" thing.

yeah, and why did the Washington AG hold a press conference around this? he should have tried to hide it. seriously.

the AG barely held Amazon accountable at all. the fines are miniscule. my guess is that these same lead and cadmium tainted products will be sold through Amazon again in the future. lead paint in toys has been a problem for decades. this isn't enough to stop it. this problem calls for a far stronger remedy.

also: where are all the California Prop 65 lawsuits? where is Calfornia's AG on this issue? we have way more Amazon customers in California and fewer conflicts of interest since Amazon is headquartered in WA. this makes no sense.

It's quite simple to build a system that works. UK retailers are liable for legality, safety etc. You don't just dump another new piece of crap on the shelf. Larger retailers have a formal process of becoming a supplier to them that has your products tested, and random sampling of what's coming in until you have proved yourself enough to be rated trusted supplier. There's a lot more to it than "will it sell?".

Even wholesalers and cash and carry places will normally have systems to ensure what small sellers are getting are safe and legal.

Amazon is the big fat exception as they're busy being "platform" and try to duck their responsibilities with "not our problem".

Nett result is I trust anywhere on the high street, even poundshop and other bottom end chains, more on safety and counterfeits etc than Amazon.

I used to work for a very large materials testing company - that had labs throughout the UK doing "due diligence" testing on products in shops.

They have people that actually go to large retailers and buy articles and they are tested continually. I got a life from one of the buyers at one of the labs and she mentioned that you get funny looks if you have a shopping trolley filled with, for example, one example of each type of cream cake being sold in that store.

I dont buy anything on Amazon that I need to rely on being a real product for safety after I received a fraudulent pair of solar eclipse glasses.

For my child, we dont buy any toys at all on Amazon. I especially dont buy branded stuff because I don't know what is commingled.

Amazon may not be losing money here yet, but eventually they will. Everyone that works there should be ashamed.

How did you know the glasses were fake? Hopefully not the hard way...

Amazon emailed me the day before the eclipse even though I bought them months before.

I couldn't get a new pair of glasses in time.

Fwiw, Amazon emailed many people in error. I spoke to someone who lost around 400k when Amazon emailed all their customers that they were fake even though he had the testing documentation and had provided it to Amazon.

My guess is that they realized they didnt know who they sent what to so they decided to cover their liability first and foremost.

Had I spent money to travel to see the eclipse and was denied then opportunity, I would have been very upset.

"a company volunteered the information that they've detected my highly niche item was a fake. they should be ashamed that there were apparently no other suppliers who could get it to me!"

willing to bet they gave you a full refund as well

does that really recompense for the possibility of sustaining permanent damage to a product you purchased on a marketplace you believed to be safe? Is it really ok to sell fraudulent products that could harm the user as long as you give a full refund? fine, but the trust is destroyed. This seems like an effort to avert bad publicity, I don't think they would email a customer about a fraudulent product in any other case.

Agreed. I don't understand how Amazon gets away with so much shady shit. How are there not more legal problems for Amazon?

There have been some high profile incidents with other big companies with big legal budgets (Mercedes or Lexus? Apple? Nike?) but it all seems to go nowhere. It seems like it takes an army of lawyers to tackle one small incidence of shady behavior for one specific client. It never seems to rise up to the level of being handled as a pattern of behavior.

>They should require amazon to randomly sample.

Isn't that just the government passing the buck to Amazon then? The should have auditors from the FDA or NIST or whatever to do random tests at Amazon warehouses.

We should, given the scale and importance. Testing for heavy metals (lead, cadmium, etc) is easy with hand held XRF (xray fluorescence) [1].

[1] https://www.spectro.com/products/xrf-spectrometer/xsort-xrf-...

I think this is actually a reasonable option, i just tend more towards the side of "government is unlikely to be good at this" than others.

But for people who feel otherwise, and think it's necessary sure, no issue with it.

It’s hard to sympathise with Amazon, but it seems very wrong to put the burden on the point of sale vs the supplier, especially for smaller stores.

The burden of not putting dangerous products out in the market should lay on the manufacturer, through certifications or some form of safety requirements. In this case no doubt Amazon has to pay if they’ve acted as an importer, but you wouldn’t expect your supermarket to randomly sample all their product.

maybe the US regulations need an update to make school supplies a more strict category?

"you wouldn’t expect your supermarket to randomly sample all their product."

I believe they actually do for some types of products.

>This will simultaneously make it expensive for those sellers actually trying to comply (lab testing is not cheap)

If they have a legitimate and well managed supply chain, it's not actually that difficult. The onus should be on the paint (or other materials) manufacturer to certify their product, with third party verification, and the certification flows down the chain.

Of course compliant materials are more expensive and the certification isn't cost free, but otherwise shady outfits wouldn't flout the law. However there shouldn't be any need for a distributor to do lab testing themselves. They just need to be conscientious and organised.

"If they have a legitimate and well managed supply chain, it's not actually that difficult. "

I don't necessarily disagree, but this is also really hard in practice for a lot of small manufacturers.

I happen to know a bunch about the childrens toy one for various reasons, so i'll go with that one. About 30-50% of wood finish manufacturers certify the relevant things for their finishes, but the wood coatings market is not a huge one (They make their living off auto and oem coatings, etc), and so unless you are using thousands of gallons a year, you are using a local distributor.

What you can get there will be hit and miss. In fact, it may not be possible to get a certified finish at all in your area.

(These are not paints, which are widely available).

Personally, i've had to order finishes from across the country in some cases, and i live in northern california (not exactly a small area :P).

(This wasn't for childrens toys, but it was to meet a similar regulation)

In very large markets, you don't have this problem because the components themselves tend to be plentiful.

Additionally, you are often required to test the combined product, not just the components.

Whose to say that two otherwise safe materials used in manufacturing are safe when combined? Whose to say that this material which is safe when used as intended is also safe when subjected to elevated temperatures during a manufacturing operation? It doesn't seem like you can just accumulate stacks of paperwork to determine that an end product is sufficiently safe for use.

It obviously shouldn’t require some children getting toxic school supplies, people sustaining burns or worse from counterfeit 18650 lithium battery cells, or any other suffering to get testing and certification on certain products, but I don’t think it’s as bad as you imply by “passing the buck”. It’s the easy way out for Amazon, sure, but if they do it enough times they will get a reputation for spotty inventory.

I’ve already experienced this a few times with certain classes of products they wouldn’t ship to California due to stricter regulation on how much ozone they produce. That’s why I had to go to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy a HEPA air filter for my bedroom during the fires last year: https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/research/indoor/ozone.htm

When it’s one product it’s easy to point fingers at the regulation for the inconvenience, but shouldn’t I be glad my filter fits those tighter regulations? The diesel car maker scandal is proof regulations can be cheated, but it seems to me like more regulation would get us to a point where that would be quickly exposed.

Let Amazon pass the buck to sellers. Regulate more things, and eventually it will be in their economic interest to run their own tests. They got where they were by having everything, and they can fall if that reputation does.

> They should require amazon to randomly sample.

This doesn’t seem like the most sensible approach.

If my yogurt product is sold in grocery stores, isn’t it my responsibility to make sure my yogurt is produced properly and my responsibility to label it with the correct ingredients and nutrition facts? I wouldn’t expect it to be the grocery store owner’s responsibility to randomly sample my yogurt and check for its quality or ingredients.

Edit: Toned down inappropriately strong wording. Sorry for that. Didn’t mean to be a blowhard.

If you sell a product in your store imported from a chinese company with no presence in your country, that violates local laws and regulations, you are definitely liable when it turns out that product is poisoning children.

It’s sensible that stores should remove products that aren’t safe. That’s what Amazon has agreed to do in this case, on a nationwide level.

What doesn’t seem to make sense is requiring Amazon to do the actual safety testing. That would be akin to requiring baby stores to run safety tests on strollers, or requiring car dealerships to perform crash tests.

You don't need to perform the safety testing but you're responsible for the safety testing.

Let's assume that you have a physical store and you import and sell a toy and trust the manufacturer-provided documentation that claims that the toy is safe. The customer trusts you and relies on you to ensure that the toy is safe, the customer doesn't need to trust the manufacturer. If it turns out that the offshore manufacturer lied and faked the documentation, that's not the customer's fault or problem - you're fully liable and need to compensate the customer for selling a shoddy product that's apparently not fit for sale. Generally you have the right to recover that compensation from the manufacturer but if you can't do that (e.g. the manufacturer has since disappeared, or is insolvent) then that's not the customers problem, they bought the thing from you and it's your responsibility to uphold the warranties (at least in EU law) - so if you sell products from shoddy manufacturers then you assume full responsibility of them, which generally means that importers/distributors (or large retailers - a small store would delegate that task&risk to the wholesale importer/distributor, a major chain would do it themselves) audit their suppliers to ensure that they're not lying, faking safety documentation, etc.

The baby store doesn't need to run safety tests on strollers, but it does need to verify that the safety tests have been done and ensure that the strollers are actually safe. The store can (and usually will) rely on others to ensure the safety and testing, but if they choose to rely on unreliable partners, that's the fault of that store.

> That’s what Amazon has agreed to do in this case, on a nationwide level.

That's kind of the problem, isn't it? They've "agreed" to do it, as if not doing that was also an option but Amazon decided generously (and not to set precedent) to comply with the law.

Corporations are not sex offenders, they are very rational. If you fine them, their delinquency stops. If you don't, it won't.

Those are all totally reasonable things to ask if they're sourcing their baby strollers from some random factory located in a country where safety standards are not what is expected where you're selling them.

If the retailer saving money because the factory they sourced their product from is not testing adequately then obviously the retailer is shouldering that risk and becomes the responsible party. They don't necessarily need to do the testing in house, they could outsource it, but ultimately the cost of testing should be borne somewhere in the supply chain, before it reaches the consumer.

And honestly, this should be better for the retailer than sending them into the outside world untested and then having to do some big recall operation when, in this example, either a parent spots the flaw or the baby stroller collapses on their child.

The problem is that the manufacturer has an incentive to lie, and we don't have a good way to outright blacklist companies that aren't in the US that do that, so we need to have multiple levels of testing, ideally at least one from someone who doesn't have an incentive to lie.

Local representation is the crux of the issue here. Amazon is selling imported products straight from Chinese manufacturers. Without an American entity who has something to lose (or even go to jail) as a middle man there will never be safety. This obviously adds cost value chain, but ultimately a very real cost that needs to exist somewhere.

Your intuition about the grocery store's liability may have some deficiencies. A victim of food poisoning from negligence could absolutely bring suit against both the store and the yogurt maker.

Indeed in the Commonwealth, my (limited) understanding is that in those circumstances, liability had always been understood as being with the retailer, not the manufacturer, until the landmark decision of Donoghue v Stevenson in 1932 established the idea of a duty of care owed by the manufacturer even though there was no direct contract between manufacturer and end consumer.

Thank you for sharing this. I wasn’t aware that this concept that manufacturers have duty of care to consumers — which is ingrained in my intuition — is actually a legal construct that evolved less than a century ago. [1][2]

[1]: http://lawgovpol.com/case-study-donoghue-v-stevenson-1932/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donoghue_v_Stevenson

Does this let the retailer get off the hook? If so that seems like a terrible idea in a world where the manufacturer is likely to be international.

No, it doesn’t let the retailer off the hook. It just means the manufacturer can be liable depending on the circumstances.

And yet if your Fage was contaminated with salmonella or lead you’d be first to sign on to the class action. On the other end would be anyone with a pulse between you and the manufacturer: the clerk, the grocery store, the distributor, the supplier and the manufacturer themselves. The fact is the end customer isn’t required to be their own certification lab. The onus falls on those who bring the products to market to ensure they don’t kill us. And yeah sometimes that means the grocery store, if they’re being willfully blind/negligent. I’m not saying they are, I have no context, though I don’t imagine Amazons attorneys told them to sign whatever was put in front of them.

By selling us a product the manufacturer and the grocery store warrant merchantability [1] and fitness for a particular purpose [2] ("implied warranty"). If you got a hot cup of lead instead of yogurt and the grocery story knew it was likely to happen and looked the other way, you’d be well within your rights to sue... everyone.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-314

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-315

We've seen large cases recently of beef and greens contaminated with salmonella. E.g.

https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/newport-10-18/index.html

I don't know every lawsuit, but the blame in these cases seems to largely not land on the grocery stores, but the manufacturer.

That's true in the case where the grocery stores (and their reputations) are also the victims. I guarantee if they'd had some idea that they were selling contaminated greens, they'd be on the hook too. I'm guessing that this settlement indicates someone at Amazon knew or had the reasonable expectation of having known what was happening, and are now not-admitting-fault-but-simultaneously-fixing-it in true American judicial system fashion.

If Amazon is required to test, what about every small store that buys inventory? Are they required to test it all, too? Such a regulation would put them all out of business.

Regulations are all pragmatic in the end.

For example, you could say "companies that make x million" are required to randomly test and certify they did (and will be fined 200% of profit for false certification).

and then you have a small entity program where the government is doing the sampling or something.

It is surely impossible to have a one size fits all that scales from "person selling at farmers market" to "amazon"

Pragmatic? Well, we don't have mom-and-pop toymakers anymore due to regulation.

Should also add that Amazon is not really all that good at evaluating lab reports, nor could they be unless they changed what people evaluated the reports. They have a hard time telling the difference between a report doctored by someone with a fourth grade education and one from one of the most respected labs in the country.

There was horrible metals in some Canadian children's jewelry. As someone with a young child I do not care if it kills off small sellers if it prevents poisoning of my child.

Maybe there is an opportunity here for innovation or a startup to facilitate this testing?

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