In the clothing business, areas largely dependent on fashion retail are going to be hit hard. For example, LA company Charlie Rocket is expecting a $10,000-$20,000 cost for testing, and what’s more, retailers can use the new law as an excuse to return non-selling items to manufacturers, to the latter’s fiscal loss.
Of course, only government certified labs can run the tests, and as there aren’t many, each test will cost a company around $800 and prevent punctual product shipments. Not to mention the over $620 million of taxpayer money that the Consumer Product Safety Commission has been given to enforce the $100,000 fine plus federal prison time punishment for not executing the regulations.
without doing much more research on this law, I think it’s pretty clear that each product does not have to be tested. If that was the case then not even the all powerful Playstation 3 could be economically viable if each unit had to pass an $800 test.
So I imagine the testing has to be done on each lot or shipment. That, of course, puts an $800 test in better perspective. Depending on how big a shipment is, it could end up being a pretty small portion of the price. How unreasonable is it? In the last year or so China’s slipshot quality control has killed a lot of beloved pets in the US, allowed lead coated toys to be sold by well respected toymakers and in China itself we’ve had, what, a few hundred babies sick or dead because some company decided to water down powdered formula with bits of plastic?
It seems like there’s a pretty good argument for requiring that lots of toys and clothes be tested even if this does impose a cost on us. It is probably still a fraction of the amount of money saved by having a global market that can import low cost products from overseas. And it’s probably a lot cheaper than closing the borders and requiring that toys and clothes be made only in America where our product liability laws are probably strong enough to deter using lead paint on children’s toys.
The one issue I’ve heard that I think is legit is that the gov’t has not issued clear rules on how thrift stores that sell used stuff are supposed to comply with the law when products come in without original packaging. NPR had a report/interview where they said that they were not requiring such stores do lab testing on their inventory but they are asking them to check against a 15 page long list of known toy recalls. I’m sympathetic and I think they should try to write reasonable regulations but that is one sector that will probably see a lot of bad toys as people dump their used items & less reptuable retailers try to sell off their bad toys in the secondary markets for a few bucks.

Logic and efficiency from the federal government? What? Are you crazy?
My solution is to avoid, as much as I possibly can in this China-choked world, buying anything made in that country. I even found a pair of athletic shoes made in the USA. Amazing! For one, I buy a lot less worthless junk and, when I do find a product made here at home, I feel good about buying it. Despite what Boonton said, I would say, let China test everything and anything they plan to try to sell in our country or we don’t let it in. Let their products bear the cost of those tests and that will also go far in making American products more competitively priced. I assume here that lead in paint is almost exclusively a problem with products made in communist China.

I work in a large manufacturing company. We found out (through a whistle-blower) that one of our suppliers had started using a non-certified material that was flammable and inappropriate for our product. We did a massive recall and tested tens of thousands of units.
Turns out the president of this little company was just under a lot of cost pressure and decided to substitute the cheaper material, hoping nobody would find out. Suing him for our expenses would have just bankrupted the small company and we wouldn’t have gotten anything. Moreover, we had to keep using the company because they were the only ones who had the tools to make this thing!
Anyway, there was this huge internal discussion about how this could have happened, and why we weren’t testing these things ourselves, and how many units you have to test to be POSITIVE that they are all good. The answer is, of course, 100%. In fact, you have to test all of them SEVERAL TIMES because false negative results are possible. Just taking samples and testing those always leaves room for bad stuff to go through. For instance, if you have a lot of 1000 units, and 10 of them are bad, you have to test a hundred units just to have a 50/50 chance of catching one of the bad ones.
So you do a risk assesment.
1. Just how dangerous is this problem?
2. How likely is it to occur?
If the answers are “very” and “very”, you test every unit. That’s expensive.
If the answers are “not so much” and “kind of improbable”, you can still test everything to protect your customer. But you can bet there’s s a competitor out there who will risk blowing this off and thus undercut you on price. Goodbye, jobs.
So you do you best to pick a reputable supplier, put in some audit testing just to make sure the thing doesn’t get massively out of control, and hope the the incidents are few and far between enough that they don’t make the papers and land you in court.

Just taking samples and testing those always leaves room for bad stuff to go through. For instance, if you have a lot of 1000 units, and 10 of them are bad, you have to test a hundred units just to have a 50/50 chance of catching one of the bad ones.
It’s hard to know how bad bad would be without a cost benefit analysis. What, I think, would be really really really bad is if a shipping container had a 15 kiloton nuclear bomb set to go off 3 weeks after it was scheduled to arrive in a US port and be delievered to an empty warehouse. Yet we don’t test 100% of all containers or even 10%.
In the case you describe it almost sounds like it makes sense for your company to either buy the supplier outright so you have complete control over their operations or have inspectors on their site monitoring the product they are sending you. That’s from your description where this company is the only supplier of the part, the part is critical to your product, and cheaping out on the material will cause a catastrophic consquence. There might be some more creative options like forcing the supplier to purchase an insurance policy that pays out a large amount should any problems develop from using bad materials.
But for lead paint and similiar concerns, I don’t think 100% compliance is absolutely necessary. If we were at a point where we could say with 95% confidence that 95% or more of the items on the market were free of dangerous levels of lead that would be pretty good. That doesn’t mean 5% of the items are dangerous but it does mean you can determine it with random sampling and some high profile selective enforcement.
I agree that gov’t mandates can be onerous, annoying and downright unfair but I’m not really hearing any viable alternative here. I don’t think massive protectionism against China and other developing nations is politically viable and it would cost much more than this bill. People should not have to put up with massive recalls that span dozens of products at a time. It’s one thing for one product or even one whole brand to go on recall but the dog food scare, where it felt like every other product was subjected to the problem, is simply unacceptable. Let something like that happen with baby food and you’re going to get a public that is going to go ballistic. I don’t doubt for a moment that there’s a dozen plus ways to make this bill better and less onerous but the gist of this post is more along the lines that the bill should be scrapped outright. I don’t see the case being made for that assertion here.

More knee-jerk stupidity from the all-knowing government…

Come on, ZZ, do you really think it is going to tack on $800 to the cost of every toy? Come out of the right-wing fog, dude. If the price of a $5 toy jumps to $800, I’ll buy you all your toys from now on, ok? Did the price of lead-free paint jump to $800 a gallon? Did lead-free gasoline jump to $800 a gallon? Does it cost food manufacturers $800 per item to comply with food safety laws? The $800 number is bogus. I would guess it’s closer to 8 cents or maybe .8 cents.

My biggest concern is whether the toys are made by gays, to further their gay agenda. There are a lot less gays in China than in the United States (in fact, all the openly gay Chinese people that you hear about are American). So you can feel safer in many respects with a Chinese toy compared to an American toy. The one big exception was probably that gay Ken doll from a few years back.

I’m curious, Robin – how many dollars is it worth per child to prevent the brain damage than can result from lead poisoning?
Using a cost benefit analysis, one may show that there is a 1:10,000,000 chance of a child chewing on the rim of a bicycle tire. Now, if you put a cost on what it is worth to keep that child from getting lead poisoning at an extremely high dollar amount- it still comes out that it’s not worth testing.
- unless of course you are a government official having to show that you care, and having to put a bill on the floor to show your constituents that you are doing a great job and worth the $100+K salary and $160/day per diem.
Again, if you want to totally remove risk in your lives, and totally remove the risk of brain damage from lead poisoning, your choices are to become a bubble boy or give all your money to the government on the hope that they will keep you safe.
Gosh, where would we all be if it weren’t for antibacterial soap, bicycle helmets, bluetooth headsets, and school-mandated sex education. I guess we’d all be dead.

CPSC hasn’t yet decided how to enforce or really even what to enforce on this law. They haven’t decided if batches can be tested or even what testing procedures to use. Give the law some time to work itself out. Personally, I feel the law detracts from the real primary cause of lead poisoning – lead paint.

“Well actually with paint you can test a huge vat of paint. Then split it into individual cans.”
Ahh, good point. Too bad you can’t do that for toys.
“sample testing based on good statistical procedures”
The thing is, if you do the statistics correctly, any high level of confidence requires a alarge amount of samples. Unless the thing you’re looking for is not random.