September 23rd, 2007 @ 4:15 pm
Recalls
Cribs Recalled After Deaths of 2 Children - New York Times
A faulty drop-rail side in several crib models made by the company can detach and create a small space where infants can become trapped, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The agency said the problem stemmed from a hardware and design flaw that allows for incorrect installation of the part.
If 1 million people buy a crib, and 2 of those million put it together wrong and it causes their baby to get trapped and die, it is awful, but not the companies fault.
This just bothers me more than it normally would because we just talked about the Pinto in Business Ethics and from the way I see it Ford got the raw deal from what happened there.
However, a 1991 law review paper by Gary Schwartz [2], argued that the case against the Pinto was less clear-cut than commonly supposed. Only 27 people ever died in Pinto fires. Given the Pinto’s production figures (over 2 million built), this was no worse than typical for the time. Schwartz argued that the car was no more fire-prone than other cars of the time, that its fatality rates were lower than comparably sized imported automobiles, and that the supposed “smoking gun” document that plaintiffs claimed showed Ford’s callousness in designing the Pinto was a document based on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations about the value of a human life rather than a document used to design the Pinto.
I am not an evil person, and I do not want babies to die; I do however think it is stupid that a consumer building a crib wrong can create the kind of blame game comments like it has caused on The Consumerist.
