Toxic Toys: Who Inspects Them? Wal-Mart? Not Likely
Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) continues to sell a number of products which contain high lead levels and some of these are toys. The same is true about children’s products sold by Target (NYSE: TGT), according to The Center for Environmental Health.…
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“We cannot understand how Wal-Mart can continue to sell these lead-tainted products to children in any state, or any country,” said Caroline Cox, Research Director at CEH, in a statement.
One high chair sold at Target had 70 times the allowable level of lead. Tests of Walmart products discovered high lead levels in toddlers’ bean bag chairs, youth boxing gloves and toy foam beads sold for children’s jewelry. The items ranged from more than 3 times to more than 45 times the legal limit. In all, CEH tested components of 2,300 products of children’s toys between September of last year and July 2010.
The report exposes the issue of why large retailers do not have aggressive inspection programs. The answer is almost certainly cost. Fines are probably cheaper than the armies of inspectors needed to review products for high levels of dangerous paint, metals, and components. This duty falls to the federal government, which has neither the resources nor the personnel to properly do the job.
One of the wonderful things about big business in the US is the cat and mouse games it plays with regulators. This is particularly true with large firms involved in pollution and worker safety problems. Most problems are discovered after the fact–after some incident, perhaps a significant one, has been discovered. BP plc (NYSE: BP) and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) stand as recent signature cases.
Wal-Mart is large enough to inspect what it puts on its shelves. The world’s largest retailer might argue that such programs would be expensive but what kind of excuse is that?
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
