Welcome to the concept of "joint and several liability". Say you were in a phone booth and a car jumped the curb and ran you over but didn't manage to kill you.

Your attorney would sue the motorist but maybe they don't have insurance. Maybe they borrowed the car - the owner would get sued. The city would get sued because the curb was too low. The gas station would get sued because there weren't protective barriers around the phone booth. The phone company would get sued because the phone booth was too close to traffic. The maker of the phone booth would get sued because it wasn't made properly. And probably other things that I can't think of.

Fortunately for gas stations there basically aren't phone booths anymore. But be careful loaning your car or gun to somebody else.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/j/joint-and-several-liabi...

Yeah but if the manufacturer went kaput or the store was negligent in sourcing beef you could sue. Both of these are a problem with amazon. If target sold Chinese cribs that killed kids for example you can bet folks would sue target and not the manufacturer

The idea of negligent sourcing is interesting... you would have to prove that they knowingly bought and sold a bad product.

The idea of "blame the retailer" is, to a degree, protectionist. Your solving the problem of "can't sue the chinese manufacturer" by blaming the retailer. The reality of the world we live in has changed so drastically since those laws were made that we should probably revisit those.

Blaming retailers only serves to have fewer, larger retailers, not choice (and competition). This entire line of thinking presents a massive potential to lead to less choice, in retailers and products, leading to LESS competition.

You don’t want a lot of fly by night foreign vendors just dumping unsafe goods. It’s a good idea to just eliminate them by making it too expensive to deal with liability claims for anyone that resells that crap.

No, they wouldn't. Target had nothing to do with it.

It's odd to say that the only company you had a direct business relationship with had nothing to do with it. Product liability does apply to the seller of that product, in addition to the manufacturer and distributor. That doesn't mean retailers won't fight it, or that it is easy to prove. It's just how the laws are in the US.

If I drink a coca-cola and it turns out it had rat poison in it, I'd likely blame coke, and not the grocery store, even though I have no direct business relationship with coke.