Amazon forced to recall 400K products that could kill, electrocute people | Hacker News Reader

Amazon forced to recall 400K products that could kill, electrocute people

arstechnica.com

35 pointsUmofomia13 comments

A good rule of thumb for shopping an Amazon - avoid anything that you can ingest, apply on your skin, and anything electrical.

These are better to buy in a brick and mortar store where a human verifies that the product has indeed come from supplier who is verified in some way. Of course this doesn't make brick and mortar products automatically safe, but they are far better than Amazon where quality control is offloaded onto the customers.

I used to say those same rules for Dollar Tree.

I'm not that strict about Amazon, but I decided that I don't trust buying OTC pharmaceuticals from Amazon. Even though I hate dealing with the current vendor, since they're bizarrely incompetent a dozen different ways, I suspect they are at least much better about supply chain integrity.

May I ask which vendor you use for pharmaceutical needs now? I used to use Amazon Pharmacy but then have since gone back to CVS.

For actual pharmacy needs (not over-the-counter), I don't have routine needs, only rare occasional random injury.

So I just use a brick&mortar pharmacy nearby, where the pharmacists/techs almost always vary from good to conspicuously excellent.

I think the profession is generally good and conscientious.

This is a good rule of thumb. I'd even go further and say use Amazon as a last resort merchandiser maybe except for few areas like comixology. I remember seeing threads here about how Amazon mixes SKUs of different origins so it feels like they're complicit with the fraudulent sellers.

I've also stopped buying usb stick drives as well as micro-sd cards: the chance of getting a counterfeit piece of junk is just too high, and has happened to me more than once.

On the other hand, my local brick and mortar store (Esselunga) has high quality Kioxia usb devices for a fairly good price. And Kioxia is high-end stuff anyways, so worth spending a few more euros.

Incredible they tried on the "we're just a logistics company not responsible for products" when they control so much of the sale, purchasing and stocking process.

Amazon used to be somewhat trustworthy, but now I trust my local thrift store more. The last time I bought something from Amazon was around 1.5 years ago. There are even stores that have a business model of selling Amazon’s returned products!

A lot of the brick and mortar stores have started joining up with third party sellers now that you can do same day click and collect on. Places like the range, b&m, b&q etc that you might have thought you were 'safe' from the cheaper low quality products but they hide it behind a lot of dark patterns that the average consumer wouldn't know!

So I guess there will be more Bigclivedotcom deathdapter teardowns. This has been a common occurrence since 2016: https://youtu.be/3Hdn0MuCK_0

There need to be more class-action lawsuits against Amazon, and the FTC and CPSC need to surveil Amazon's products and take regular enforcement action.

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41111317

Could this somehow turn into criminal case against actual people in charge at Amazon?

The criminal justice system exists to protect amazon, not the other way around.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/08/01/amazon-te...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com