The series of events that led Dussault to film the sequence began on a freezing Chicago day earlier that winter. At the time his son was 3 years old. It was Grandma's turn to pick up the boy at preschool. But there was a problem. "My mother-in-law called me," Dussault says, "and said she couldn't get the car-seat straps to tighten up."
Dussault drove to the school and took his child home himself, along with the car seat that had apparently failed. He owned the same item?the $79 Vantage, purchased at Walmart and sold under the Safety 1st brand name. In his garage Dussault tested his own seat; again, the straps loosened. "I knew that if I got two doing that," he says, "there were probably thousands out there doing the same thing."
Dussault contacted the seats' manufacturer, Dorel Juvenile Group. Based in Columbus, Ind., Dorel is the world's largest maker of children's car seats. It sells about 8 million child-restraint systems?the official term for car seats?each year. But shoppers won't find the Dorel name in stores. Instead, the company's goods appear under a range of recognizable brands including Disney, Cosco, Eddie Bauer, and Maxi-Cosi.
Dorel offered to exchange Dussault's seats. But when the replacements arrived, Dussault says they failed his test as well. He filed a complaint with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Meanwhile, Dorel asked him to return the original seats so the company could test them, standard procedure when an exchange is offered. Dussault was hesitant. "They were hot on my tail to get these seats out of my hands," he says. The company, he believed, intended to "sweep things under the rug."
To prevent that from happening, Dussault made the video. He contacted the news media. A local NBC affiliate dispatched a crew. The demise of Elmo went viral, and in 2011 Dorel recalled 800,000 car seats. A win for Elmo and kids everywhere?
That's debatable.
Dussault describes his struggle in David and Goliath terms, a concerned parent confronting a faceless corporation whose interests are driven more by sales than by safety. When it comes to products designed to protect children, that position isn't difficult to understand. I'm the father of a 16-month-old, and even before our son arrived, my wife and I did what most expectant families do: We went shopping.
I was amazed by the number of products available and dismayed by how many appeared to be defective?car seats, strollers, toys, cribs, nursery monitors. It seemed impossible to pick a category that wasn't prone to recalls. When my wife and I debated whether to allow our infant to sleep in the same bed with us, we were told that the only safe way to do so was to buy a "positioning device," a product that would prevent a sleepy parent from rolling over and smushing the poor tyke (never mind that parents have been cuddling their children to sleep for millennia). We rejected the advice, and good thing: On our next visit to Babies "R" Us, the positioner aisle was empty. It turned out the device itself could lead to suffocation if a child were pressed against it the wrong way.
At first my impression was similar to Dussault's: a rogue industry. A little research seemed to back that up. NHTSA recalled more than 100 different models of car seats from nearly a dozen manufacturers during the past decade. And media accounts almost always emphasize the profit-trumps-all angle when it comes to product defects. Particularly notable is a 2007 Chicago Tribune story that chronicled Dorel's attempts to prevent an earlier recall. Dorel had argued?correctly but unsuccessfully?that the straps on the car seats weren't up to standards because there were no clear standards when they were manufactured in 2000 and 2001. Other companies, it pointed out, used materials of similar strength and design and hadn't been penalized. The reporters painted the company as uncaring, even conspiratorial?quoting an internal email from a Dorel executive who wrote: "Why? It still sells." The series of investigative reports that included the story won a Pulitzer Prize. And after losing an appeal to the NHTSA in 2010, Dorel was forced to recall about 4 million car seats.
But eventually I began to question whether product defects could really be so rampant. Most of the recalls I had read about appeared to be for items that caused no injuries or where injuries could only be vaguely attributed to a specific problem. As I began to search my home for recalled products?not just stuff aimed at kids, but appliances, tools, electronics, and everything else modern shoppers own and covet?I quickly became overwhelmed. There were so many recalls and so many sources of information on recalled products that I could barely keep track. Did I own dangerous items? Were they really dangerous or just potentially dangerous? And what action should I take, if any?
Trying to sort through it all was impossible, so I gave up. And in that way I became an even more typical American consumer: one unable to make my home truly safer, because the system by which we judge, identify, and correct broken gear is as defective as anything found on store shelves.
In the United States, product recalls are overseen by six federal agencies. The majority come under the jurisdiction of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), which handles everything from toys and power tools to appliances. Recalls connected to automobiles?cars, tires, and child-restraint systems?are within the NHTSA's purview. Boats and nautical items are regulated by the Coast Guard. Products containing chemicals, such as house paint and pesticides, are Environmental Protection Agency territory; the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) handle edibles, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics.
The division of federal oversight?car seats to the NHTSA, strollers to the CPSC; burgers to the USDA, fries to the FDA?is just the beginning of the knot consumers need to untangle if they're hoping to learn whether a product they own poses a threat. Though there's ostensibly a one-stop database of product alerts, recalls.gov, the website's utility is marred by confusing design and poor information retrieval. Clicking on the Search for Recalls button opens a page with six additional search boxes, each tied to a different agency or category. If you don't know what jurisdiction a product falls under, you'll have little success, which may be just as well: Sometimes products are identified only by inventory-control codes useful to retailers and manufacturers. Photographs are often unavailable. If you do manage to discover a potentially relevant recall, you're given the investigation number assigned by the overseeing agency but not always a link to the investigative details themselves.
Details that are included don't generally provide context for injuries or useful consumer information. For example, the notice for a Task Force electric log splitter, recalled in July 2011, states that two injuries had been reported after operators placed their hands on the handle while the splitter was in operation. The notice instructs consumers to stop using the product and send for free warning labels. "That has got to be one of the weirdest recalls we've ever seen," wrote Everett Snyder on ProToolReviews.com. "The recall itself doesn't do too much to explain the problem or deliver specific (detailed) instructions for safe use of the tool... No, for that you need to wait for the stickers to show up."
This muddle is made worse by the scale and number of recalls. During the past five years, more than 150 million children's items, 110 million household goods, and 9 million pieces of sporting equipment have been recalled by the CPSC alone, according to the recall-tracking group WeMakeItSafer. There are so many recalls?nearly 1500 by all six agencies in 2011?that many consumers have simply stopped paying attention to them. A 2010 Consumer Reports survey found that just under 25 percent of respondents ever bothered to research whether a product they owned had been subject to a recall; of those who knew they owned a recalled product, only about 30 percent actually did something about it. There's even a new term for the phenomenon of ignoring product-safety warnings: recall fatigue. "So many recalls are announced in so many ways that when you hear it on the news, it just doesn't register," says Craig Wilson, vice president of quality assurance at Costco Wholesale Corp. "The perception is that there's a lot of crying wolf going on."
A day after Elmo's mishap hit Chicago airwaves, the NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation opened case PE10-009?a preliminary evaluation, which doesn't indicate that a recall is necessary or even being contemplated. Though the agency receives about 35,000 consumer complaints each year, just two?both Dussault's?had been registered for the Vantage, which had been highly rated in Consumer Reports.
Preliminary or not, opening an investigation also opens floodgates. The manufacturer of the product in question is required to deliver thousands of pages of data: test results, transcripts of customer-service calls, descriptions of manufacturing procedures, sales figures. The NHTSA announces the inquiry to the public, an evidence-seeking strategy that can lead to hundreds of additional complaints. For the Vantage, it yielded only six new reports, none of which involved injuries. Despite this, the agency moved the inquiry to the next level: engineering analysis. On July 2,2010, case EA10-005 was opened: Dorel was asked to provide complete details on how the seat was built and tested, and whether any changes had been made at the factory that might have coincided with the complaints of strap slippage. Over the next couple of months, Dorel submitted thousands more pages of documentation.
In an 11-page letter to the NHTSA dated Sept. 21, Terry Emerson, Dorel's director of quality assurance, stated that no slippage had occurred in the Vantage's initial rounds of testing?2900 on crash sleds and 2000 mechanical strap pulls. The public investigation attracted 40 additional complaints, representing 0.00005 percent of seats sold. No injuries or deaths were reported. Dorel, Emerson wrote, "does not believe the subject units contain a safety-related defect."
But the company did find that some center front adjusters (CFAs)?the locking and release buttons that secure the straps?could, if excessively dirty, not tighten as well as a new product's (though that could be remedied by making sure the CFA is actually pressed firmly into place). And so, on Feb. 14, 2011, Dorel initiated a voluntary recall, offering what consumer-safety specialists call a sealed fix?a repair kit rather than a full product swap. The kit consisted of a tiny tube of food-grade lubricant; the primary ingredient, canola oil.
The main difference between Dorel's remedy and a squirt of something from a typical pantry is a sticker that comes with the kit, indicating the fix has been applied. But there is no evidence that the tube-of-lube solution addresses what caused Dussault's seats to fail. When Dorel finally got those car seats back, it couldn't reproduce the problem. Nor could outside testers, including Consumer Reports, which takes an aggressive stance toward product safety. Though Dorel won't disclose how much the recall cost, its annual reports indicate the juvenile division has spent more than $50 million in the past five years on product liability expenses.
Barry Mahal, Dorel's executive vice president for child-restraint systems, says the company agreed to the recall out of "an abundance of caution." What Mahal didn't add was that Dorel also likely agreed to the recall because it knew it couldn't win; it had already been down that road with the recall that led to the Pulitzer Prize?winning investigation. Though the Tribune reporters quoted a Dorel attorney pointing out that a particular car crash, not a product defect, may have caused a child's injuries, the story ended with a depiction of that child rocking back and forth in her kindergarten class, unable to speak or seemingly comprehend.
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