If you sell a product in your store imported from a chinese company with no presence in your country, that violates local laws and regulations, you are definitely liable when it turns out that product is poisoning children.

It’s sensible that stores should remove products that aren’t safe. That’s what Amazon has agreed to do in this case, on a nationwide level.

What doesn’t seem to make sense is requiring Amazon to do the actual safety testing. That would be akin to requiring baby stores to run safety tests on strollers, or requiring car dealerships to perform crash tests.

You don't need to perform the safety testing but you're responsible for the safety testing.

Let's assume that you have a physical store and you import and sell a toy and trust the manufacturer-provided documentation that claims that the toy is safe. The customer trusts you and relies on you to ensure that the toy is safe, the customer doesn't need to trust the manufacturer. If it turns out that the offshore manufacturer lied and faked the documentation, that's not the customer's fault or problem - you're fully liable and need to compensate the customer for selling a shoddy product that's apparently not fit for sale. Generally you have the right to recover that compensation from the manufacturer but if you can't do that (e.g. the manufacturer has since disappeared, or is insolvent) then that's not the customers problem, they bought the thing from you and it's your responsibility to uphold the warranties (at least in EU law) - so if you sell products from shoddy manufacturers then you assume full responsibility of them, which generally means that importers/distributors (or large retailers - a small store would delegate that task&risk to the wholesale importer/distributor, a major chain would do it themselves) audit their suppliers to ensure that they're not lying, faking safety documentation, etc.

The baby store doesn't need to run safety tests on strollers, but it does need to verify that the safety tests have been done and ensure that the strollers are actually safe. The store can (and usually will) rely on others to ensure the safety and testing, but if they choose to rely on unreliable partners, that's the fault of that store.

> That’s what Amazon has agreed to do in this case, on a nationwide level.

That's kind of the problem, isn't it? They've "agreed" to do it, as if not doing that was also an option but Amazon decided generously (and not to set precedent) to comply with the law.

Corporations are not sex offenders, they are very rational. If you fine them, their delinquency stops. If you don't, it won't.

Those are all totally reasonable things to ask if they're sourcing their baby strollers from some random factory located in a country where safety standards are not what is expected where you're selling them.

If the retailer saving money because the factory they sourced their product from is not testing adequately then obviously the retailer is shouldering that risk and becomes the responsible party. They don't necessarily need to do the testing in house, they could outsource it, but ultimately the cost of testing should be borne somewhere in the supply chain, before it reaches the consumer.

And honestly, this should be better for the retailer than sending them into the outside world untested and then having to do some big recall operation when, in this example, either a parent spots the flaw or the baby stroller collapses on their child.

The problem is that the manufacturer has an incentive to lie, and we don't have a good way to outright blacklist companies that aren't in the US that do that, so we need to have multiple levels of testing, ideally at least one from someone who doesn't have an incentive to lie.

Local representation is the crux of the issue here. Amazon is selling imported products straight from Chinese manufacturers. Without an American entity who has something to lose (or even go to jail) as a middle man there will never be safety. This obviously adds cost value chain, but ultimately a very real cost that needs to exist somewhere.

Your intuition about the grocery store's liability may have some deficiencies. A victim of food poisoning from negligence could absolutely bring suit against both the store and the yogurt maker.

Indeed in the Commonwealth, my (limited) understanding is that in those circumstances, liability had always been understood as being with the retailer, not the manufacturer, until the landmark decision of Donoghue v Stevenson in 1932 established the idea of a duty of care owed by the manufacturer even though there was no direct contract between manufacturer and end consumer.

Thank you for sharing this. I wasn’t aware that this concept that manufacturers have duty of care to consumers — which is ingrained in my intuition — is actually a legal construct that evolved less than a century ago. [1][2]

[1]: http://lawgovpol.com/case-study-donoghue-v-stevenson-1932/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donoghue_v_Stevenson

Does this let the retailer get off the hook? If so that seems like a terrible idea in a world where the manufacturer is likely to be international.

No, it doesn’t let the retailer off the hook. It just means the manufacturer can be liable depending on the circumstances.

And yet if your Fage was contaminated with salmonella or lead you’d be first to sign on to the class action. On the other end would be anyone with a pulse between you and the manufacturer: the clerk, the grocery store, the distributor, the supplier and the manufacturer themselves. The fact is the end customer isn’t required to be their own certification lab. The onus falls on those who bring the products to market to ensure they don’t kill us. And yeah sometimes that means the grocery store, if they’re being willfully blind/negligent. I’m not saying they are, I have no context, though I don’t imagine Amazons attorneys told them to sign whatever was put in front of them.

By selling us a product the manufacturer and the grocery store warrant merchantability [1] and fitness for a particular purpose [2] ("implied warranty"). If you got a hot cup of lead instead of yogurt and the grocery story knew it was likely to happen and looked the other way, you’d be well within your rights to sue... everyone.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-314

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-315

We've seen large cases recently of beef and greens contaminated with salmonella. E.g.

https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/newport-10-18/index.html

I don't know every lawsuit, but the blame in these cases seems to largely not land on the grocery stores, but the manufacturer.

That's true in the case where the grocery stores (and their reputations) are also the victims. I guarantee if they'd had some idea that they were selling contaminated greens, they'd be on the hook too. I'm guessing that this settlement indicates someone at Amazon knew or had the reasonable expectation of having known what was happening, and are now not-admitting-fault-but-simultaneously-fixing-it in true American judicial system fashion.