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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Yikes:

> A Wall Street Journal investigation found 4,152 items for sale on Amazon.com Inc. ’s site that have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled or are banned by federal regulators—items that big-box retailers’ policies would bar from their shelves. Among those items, at least 2,000 listings for toys and medications lacked warnings about health risks to children.

> Of the 4,152 products the Journal identified, 46% were listed as shipping from Amazon warehouses.

This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades.

Shame on Amazon.

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> This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades.

It's the kind of thing that _should_ destroy reputations. But that doesn't happen all that much anymore.

We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness.

> We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness.

The 1980s?

I don't know - maybe? Admittedly, I was just getting out of diapers at the tail end of the 80s. Perhaps this kind of thing revolves around the onset of new communication mediums and the general adoption and ease of use.

Newspapers, easy to read, hard to publish - "trusted" source. Printing press and/or other technologies aid printing and trust drops. Radio, TV, internet follow.

Depends on the act, and the accused, I guess. I'm sure similar things happened in the 1980s - I was a kid who didn't pay much attention to that kind of thing back then.

But there were plenty of scandals of a lesser nature that would ruin people, with even a hint of impropriety. Again - it depended on the act, the person(s) involved, and perhaps the way our society's wind was blowing (as always).

I can guarantee you, though, that some of things we currently witness on a daily basis would have absolutely destroyed people, careers, brands, you name it - even just 10 years ago, yet today it's just "oh, that's nice - let's see what happens tomorrow" - yesterday's scandal already forgotten.

Again - it does depend on the act and the person; you can think about many recent people who have "been in the news" for similar accusations, if not all-but-proved acts, and wonder "Why this guy, and not this other one?"

For some reason, we skewer only a selected few, and in many cases, not the ones who really need and deserve it, either.

It's also the matter of convenience / personal life impact - Amazon is ingrained in many people's weekly routine at this point. It's not that people genuinely don't care about an article like this, they just don't care enough to justify negatively impacting their life. Dale Carnegie on the concerns of the individual:

"A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa."

For me, it's that Amazon has virtually everything. I would be much happier if I could buy everything I buy from Amazon from Costco instead, but Costco's model isn't the same as Amazon's "A to Z" model. Costco wants to offer good deals on a smaller selection of stuff, rather than go for a broad selection.

It also doesn't hurt that Prime Video is bundled with Prime. On a per annum basis, Prime costs me about 2/3 what Netflix does, but I'd say I get roughly half to a third the value of Netflix out of Prime Video alone.

Ive switched to specialist retailers. Quality is higher and selection in that niche is wider than amazons offerings in that category. Shipping far more reliable as well from a competent carrier who isn’t throwing piss bottles out the window onto my street and stealing packages.

Which specialty retailers do you recommend?

I have all my stuff sent to a PO box because I live in an apartment building with no secure way to deliver packages, but, yes, I have noticed that Amazon's contracted delivery service (Amazon Logistics) is pretty incompetent. For the longest time, I couldn't get them to deliver properly to my box, even though I said in the extra info section that it's a business with business hours.

I always wondered how we got all these reports of lead in products and children's toys. There was a post a few weeks back where someone explained it and it made perfect sense: recycling.

China takes a ton of US recycling. They often melt down metals, e-waste and solder and it's difficult to separated out lead and unleaded source material. A lot of it just gets put together and used in bulk.

They have these issues due to corruption, greed and negligence. With recycling as with other stuff, China cheats and poisons people to make a quick dollar, decades go by and nothing changes and nobody goes to prison. Think of how many people use Chinese made pots and pans, or knives, and have no clue they’re poisoning themselves and their families just to save a few bucks by buying the cheap Chinese version.

To be fair, when someone is caught doing this in China, they are executed. In the US, their fancy lawyers get them off with a slap on the wrist.

Generally, they blame a "temporary worker", bribe a disinterested party official, and stop putting the poison in that particular product... For now, anyway.

> just to save a few bucks by buying the cheap Chinese version.

Or not knowing they're buying a cheap chinese version.

Yeah, with the problem Amazon US (maybe elsewhere too?) has with fakes which get mixed in with the real stock at the distribution centre, and the problem I have on Amazon UK where no matter what household product I search for all the results are from brands I've never heard of, many of which are obviously Chinese from the name, or I'd guess are Chinese from the weird English or the mystery chunky quotation marks all over the description, it's not so easy to know any more.

I have a new rescue cat and I was going to buy some cat toys but after half an hour on Amazon I felt increasingly unsure that any of the products were safe for my cat to sink her teeth into, so I guess all the toys she's getting will be coming from the local pet megastore, the only pet shop left on this side of town.

I recently got a dog and had a very similar experience. The only toys I could see that I could attempt to trust were Kong toys, but they were more expensive on amazon, weren’t covered by prime and the delivery time was 2-3 days.

Who is sending the recycling there rather than actually recycling it?

Corruption, greed and negligence seems to be everywhere.

Everyone? Seriously, there is no recycling. There is trash that ends up in the United States and trash that ends up in Asia.

There is recycling for paper and, hard plastic and metal. There is also recycling for foodwaste.

The problem is that it cannot be contaminated so it either needs to be separated or it does become trash.

Also, if you don't give a shit about your customers, lead paint often dries faster, is more durable, and is cheaper than alternatives. I suspect this is a more common reason.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/business/worldbusiness/10...

Kids' toys aside, using the lowest cost option that satisfies your customers' requirements sounds a lot like "giving a shit" to me.

The fact that lead paint is totally banned (here in the US) instead of just banned in paint marketed for use on/in inhabitable structures and allowed with warning labels required is asinine. There's tons of chemicals out there that will screw up kids and adults if they eat them and we don't ban them. We just let the civil court system assign appropriate judgements to anyone dumb enough to use them on things that will come in close enough contact with people to be harmful.

Edit: The stereotypical effect of lead exposure is that it makes people stupid. I hope you people appreciate the irony in the fact that we can't have a serious discussion about the pros and cons of lead paint.

How do you enforce this? How can a consumer know that their contractor isn’t cutting corners? Sometimes the only solution is to stop the problem at its source.

How does a consumer ever know their someone they've hired isn't cutting corners? When you pay for asbestos remediation how do you know they actually did it right? When you pay an accountant how do you know they're not half-assing it?

When you make your living doing a thing it's far more lucrative to do things right than to do them wrong. There's a bunch of incentives business owners who provide services operate within and they generally align to doing things the right way.

> When you make your living doing a thing it's far more lucrative to do things right than to do them wrong.

Really? You're posting on a thread about Amazon doing a wrong thing, which they've been doing for the greater part of a decade at this point. Maybe Amazon the company will be punished for this, but the people who made these decisions have probably already made millions and can just move on to another company with no repercussions. The idea that it's somehow more lucrative to do the right thing is ridiculous.

> When you make your living doing a thing it's far more lucrative to do things right than to do them wrong.

If this were true, no professional would ever do something wrong, cut corners, etc. Which would be nice. It's a nice picture of how things should work. But they don't.

What would be a use case for lead paint that isn't satisfied by other options and isn't used somewhere people will be exposed to it? It's not just kids & through eating it that it can be absorbed. Being around it throughout normal environmental wear & tear is enough for exposure, enough that pregnant women are advised against any exposure at all. As for the general topic of harmful chemicals, it isn't a choice between proactive prevention and after-the-fact punishment. There can be both, working in concert.

Satisfied at what price point? Everything has a cost. Every dollar society spends on one thing is a dollar society can't use on another thing.

Nobody is going to be "exposed" to a highway overpass or the hull of a ship or some chemical storage tank outside a factory enough for it to measurably affect anyone. Why can't we paint it in lead if that lasts longer for a given price point? There's all sorts of things that are out there in the world that are not interacted with enough to affect anyone in any measurable way (obviously assuming the people who work with the lead paint when wet follow proper procedures).

You can't paint only some things in lead on a whole economy scale for similar reasons to Amazon not wanting to enforce separated items in warehouses.

As long as "approved for tanks" lead paint is in the supply chain, who exactly keeps the use only to tanks. There are sufficiently durable alternatives that the lowest cost is to outright ban lead paint instead of setting up an enforcement framework to chase lead paint abuse while also paying added costs for after effects of easier cheating.

When I was a teenager, we painted our barn with lead paint. Let's just say that it didn't come from the local Sherwin-Williams. If it's for sale anywhere, the gray/black market will take care of the rest.

> highway overpass or the hull of a ship or some chemical storage tank outside a factory

the workers who build and tear it down. maintenance workers. the chips and bits the wear off and get into the environment. and for a ships hull? the bits that get into the ocean and then sea life.

Sure you could argue that its small and harmless, but is it? can you prove it?

And, all that aside, there is an increased cost of all the precautions that need to now be taken when working with it offsetting the cost savings, as well as its now hazardous waste when torn down.

> This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades.

FWIW, this article finally got my wife to say she'll stop buying from Amazon and I'm glad for that. I stopped years ago for this and other reasons, but have never quite explained my reasoning well enough to convince her.

Disclaimer: Amazon employee, opinions are my own

This claim really doesn't say much on its own. There are millions (billions?) of products on Amazon. This would be potentially a lot more damning if they released how many items they searched through to identify those 4,152.

It would also be nice if they provided some data on how prevalent these problems are at other retailers and marketplaces.

There's reason to believe the problem is probably worse at Amazon (automated approval process, historic emphasis on low cost and selection) but how much worse is it?

Quoted from some other comment's quote:

> At one point in 2013, some Amazon employees began scanning randomly selected third-party products in Amazon warehouses for lead content, say people familiar with the tests. Around 10% of the products tested failed, one says.

That's a good point about the rate of the unsafe products, but that is not the same as the rate at which those products are introduced into the population (due to lower prices, etc).

It's not valid to compare the rate of unsafe products on Walmart / Target shelves vs. in the Amazon inventory. Amazon is allowed much more slack (similar to eBay) about what gets sold through their store.

Also, it is much more appropriate for Amazon to do this work, than have the public do it.

Keep up the good work on other fronts!

> It would also be nice if they provided some data on how prevalent these problems are at other retailers and marketplaces.

Good point, but I think the point is that any mass violation (let's say more than 10 SKUs) is usually an isolated event (e.g. it's one small retailer in a local environment), as opposed to "this is just the cost of doing business for any large retailer". The more apt question would be - how many violations happen in the past at a place like Walmart.

Traditional retailers are slow to introduce SKUs compared to Amazon simply for this reason - everything is hand curated and has to go through gates to ensure safety.

> There's reason to believe the problem is probably worse at Amazon

What other marketplace in the western world has nearly as many SKUs? Like even in the same stratosphere? I'd be amazed if there is anyone even close. It's easy to manage that many SKUs at scale when you get to ignore regulation that has legitimate human safety implications. So, that's what the article is saying - don't consolidate power if you're unwilling to deal with edge cases.

My child had a wooden painted toy from amazon. He sucked on it.

Later we discovered that it has unacceptable levels of lead in the paint. We threw it out. This was done via an environmental science company, using xrf field testing. I have a certified report.

So, tell me again about how this isn’t a big deal problem. Also remind me what the date limit of lead exposure is. Actually I’ll do that one for you, it’s easy, it’s 0. There is no safe exposure to lead.

The fact that amazon could do something but is deliberately not is, well, expected. Sadly. Safe products isn’t in the mission statement of amazon.

Finally: I worked at amazon for 5 years. Right before fba came online. It’s a cost cutting culture of frugalism. Spending money on product safety doesn’t have a place there.

IMHO, it's a hatchet job that groups relatively innocuous things with dangerous things to inflate numbers. For example, take this:

>1,412 electronics listings falsely claimed to be UL certified—indicating they met voluntary industry safety standards—or didn’t provide enough information to verify the claim.

Falsely claiming to UL certified is dangerous. Not providing enough information to verify the claim is pretty benign if they actually meet standards.

This isn't to say that they aren't largely correct about Amazon's commitment to quality and safety. Just that this is an alarmist piece that doesn't rest on sound reasoning.

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