- The size is so small it is essentially meaningless to the company.
- Customers who were tricked receive nothing.
- The FTC has more play money to continue bureaucratic empire building and create more do-nothing jobs.
This is a _civil_ penalty and its the largest one to date for violating a previous order and agreement about Williams-Sonoma stopping fraudulent use of "Made in USA." More severe penalties would have ultimately required the matter to be handled directly by other government entities.
In fact the DOJ themselves could have handed out harsher penalties or pursued company executives for perjury.
The FTC did what they were able to do and instead of saying "it'd be better if the FTC had more authority and discretion in what punishes to give." you just throw snark at them and not at the political party that continually has made every government institution's teeth dull :^).
It seems like the fines are extremely light, and there is no real accountability. In the very least, they should be required to offer refunds to all people who bought those products.
This is a joke. You may as well round that down to zero.
"More than 90% of the $392 million that the FTC returned to consumers came from cases resolved before the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in AMG Capital Management, LLC v. FTC, which stripped the FTC of its ability to recover redress for consumers pursuant to Section 13(b) of the FTC Act. By comparison, in the four years preceding AMG, the FTC returned more than $11 billion to consumers using its Section 13(b) authority."
Source: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/06/...
What always baffles me, is, everyone here is a consumer. You may imagine you'll one day be a business that has to deal with regulatory burden created by the FTC, but you'd still be a consumer. You can argue they're not efficient, or effective, or politically motivated, but complaining that they exist and do their congressionally mandated job is amazing to me.
I don't know how you'd quantify that as a function of the product's price, but they figured out a way to put a price tag on emotional damage so I'm sure someone can figute it out.
Said differently, the customer lost the freedom to support a product actually made in the US while simultaneously supporting something they didn't mean to.
More abstractly the people may have hoped to support the work of their fellow countrymen, and would instead have been undercutting them with overseas labor. That loss is not financial, but in the way the US works perhaps some monetary value could be conjured for this as well. Or perhaps that loss is considered equal to the amount they overpaid for the product.
In any case I think I’ve convinced myself that the customers should receive some financial compensation and the company should be required to clearly notify people of what they have done, to scrub any goodwill they earned that could have led to an increase in future purchases at the store.
Judging by the actual response, it's not something that rises to the level of requiring compensation, because the injury is imaginary.
After the last decade of lead contamination and other toxic products from China, I would imagine some parents are wary of a product they spend close proximity to for 10 hours every night for years.
https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/china-has-a-history-of-sel...