Amazon refuses to take legal responsibility for consumer safety, sues federal watchdog agency: Consumer Reports statement
advocacy.consumerreports.org
WASHINGTON, D.C — Consumer Reports (CR), the nonprofit and nonpartisan research, testing, and advocacy organization, today denounced a lawsuit filed by Amazon against the U.S.…

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/27108135

In the suit, Amazon argues that the company should not have legal responsibility to recall and remedy consumers for unsafe products sold on its marketplace by third-party sellers. Amazon claims that it is just an intermediary and logistics provider for third-party sales, similar to a delivery service, not a distributor or retailer that has a legal responsibility to carry out recalls. The CPSC ordered Amazon to recall more than 400,000 unsafe products in July 2024, after more than three years of adjudication.

“Instead of demonstrating its commitment to consumer safety, Amazon has fought the CPSC every step of the way for more than three years, and now it’s going to court. The law is clear that Amazon is a ‘distributor’ in this case and must carry out a recall. It’s absurd to suggest that because a company hosts a marketplace online it should be exempt from sensible requirements that help get hazardous products out of people’s homes and prevent them from being sold. The court should reject Amazon’s arguments. Taking Amazon at its word would mean hazardous products slipping through the cracks, even when they are capable of injuring or killing people.”

  • NotLemming@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    20 hours ago

    I bought a wooden musical instrument on Amazon marketplace years ago. It arrived and it was a POS… Shit quality, nothing like the photos. No problem, I’ll return it to amazon. Found out I’d bought it from amazon marketplace actually and amazon wouldn’t help.

    The company who sold it could barely communicate in English and just said ‘well what do you expect, it was cheap’. Amazon again wouldn’t help, just said pay to send it back and the company has to refund you plus postage. The company was refusing, with garbled English.

    All this took so long eventually I just gave up. Then a while later I realised that the instrument had little piles of dust regularly appearing on and around it.

    It had fucking woodworm. So I dumped it but much later realised the woodworm had spread to my nice wooden speakers, which then also had to be dumped. No recourse from the company which sent me the pestilent and misdescribed musical instrument, of course!

    Amazon is bad now compared with how it used to be (if anything goes wrong get ready to lose hours of your life on chat or phone trying to get it sorted and multiple agents lying and/or hanging up) but their marketplace is the worst.