The guideline given to Walmart buyers is to achieve low costs, a motto that its buyers are encouraged to live and breathe. Court testimony provides extensive evidence that Walmart places extreme price pressures on its suppliers. This can translate, as it is claimed to have with Blitz, to a supplier realizing that adding commonsense safety features to a product can prevent it from acquiring Walmart's business.
My wife, Marla Felcher, is a product safety expert, and we have a shared interest in what keeps safer products from reaching the market and what keeps less safe products on store shelves. In she wrote: As the Chinese Overseas America Number Data world's largest retailer and the nation's largest toy seller, Wal-Mart could take the lead in ensuring the products we buy for our kids are safe. But the company does not require manufacturers of toys, carriers, high chairs or other children's products to demonstrate the products are safe before they wind up on a Wal-Mart shelf. market power to insist that manufacturers cut costs. . . . Wal-Mart has enormous clout with manufacturers. s clout not only to insist its suppliers cut costs, but also to insist that manufacturers safety-test their products.
A solid first step would be for Wal-Mart to require manufacturers of children's products to certify that their goods have been safety tested by a truly independent third party, and that the products comply with meaningful safety standards. For the world's largest retailer to take a bold position on safety would set a strong precedent for other retailers to follow. It is time for Wal-Mart to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. More than ten years later, not only has Walmart failed to lead on product safety but the Blitz cases indicate that little has changed. |
