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10 truants, $6.9 million in fines
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| Illustration by artgeckostudios.com |
The Consumer Product Safety Act requires companies that receive information about substantial real or potential safety defects
associated with household products to tell the Consumer Product Safety Commission immediately. Those that don’t are subject
to civil penalties. The companies below paid some of the largest fines over the past five years. Penalties relate to products
made in the past, not those now in production. In settling the cases, the companies generally denied any wrongdoing.
When we asked the companies to explain their fines, five responded. “We thought we were doing the right thing by trying to
locate customers ourselves,” an L. L. Bean spokesman said, “but we lost sight of our obligation to report to the CPSC. It
was a hard lesson learned.” A Lifetime Products spokesman said of the basketball-hoop bolt cited by the CPSC, “We maintain
that the bolt, when assembled correctly, does not protrude and was not defective.” Icon Health & Fitness said that it and
the CPSC “had difficulty trying to determine how the injuries occurred, and even the CPSC had difficulty recreating the conditions.
… All that notwithstanding, we elected to resolve the dispute with the CPSC.” And a spokeswoman for Dorel Juvenile Group,
the parent company of Cosco and Safety 1st, chose to focus on fixes. “The company initiated significant reforms to its product-reporting
protocol,” she told us.
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Company
|
Fine
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Allegation
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|
Cosco
Juvenile
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$1.3 million |
Cosco revised its assembly instructions and warning labels, but failed to report defects in cribs, strollers, child car seats,
and high chairs. Together, the flaws resulted in two deaths, more than 300 injuries, and 24 nonfatal entrapments of children,
said the CPSC.
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Brunswick
Corp.
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$1 million |
The company delayed reporting 31 incidents in which riders of Mongoose and Roadmaster bicycles fell to the ground face-first
after bike forks broke apart, the CPSC said.
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Lifetime
Products
|
$800,000 |
23 people suffered injuries, mostly lacerations, after colliding with a bolt on Lifetime's portable basketball hoops. Lifetime
waited more than two years after the first injury to disclose what had happened, the CSPC said.
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Wal-Mart
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$750,000 |
Wal-Mart failed to report safety hazards involving Weider and Weslo fitness machines that caused 29 spine injuries to customers
who tried the machines in the store, the CPSC said. The case was the first in which a retailer was fined for failing to report
a safety problem with a product that the company neither imported nor put its name on.
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L. L. Bean
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$750,000 |
L. L. Bean delayed reporting defects in backpack child carriers that allowed children to slip through a leg opening or topple
from the top, the CPSC said.
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Black &
Decker
(U.S.)
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$575,000 |
The CPSC said that the company was slow to report problems with its Spacemaker T1000 Type 1 toaster, and then withheld consumer
complaints and engineering documents during the agency's investigation.
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Icon Health &
Fitness
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$500,000 |
Icon didn't report serious hazards with the Weslo and Weider fitness gliders sold at Wal-Mart (see Wal-Mart above), said the
CPSC. By the time the company responded to a CPSC inquiry, the agency said, Icon knew of at least 86 incidents and 68 injuries
during 18 months.
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Safety 1st
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$450,000 |
After receiving consumer complaints about its baby walkers and baby-wipe warmers, Safety 1st made design changes but failed
to tell the CPSC about the risks of products already on store shelves, the agency charged.
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Hasbro
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$400,000 |
Seven infants suffered serious head injuries when the locking mechanism on the handle of the Playskool Fold 'N Travel infant
carrier failed, the CPSC said, and Hasbro waited too long to tell it about injuries.
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Murray
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$375,000 |
For more than a year, the CPSC says, Murray received but didn't report more than 900 incidents of riding lawn mowers' leaking
fuel from cracked gas tanks, resulting in six fires and one burn injury.
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