I called the lab, got the quote and did the math. CPSIA-mandated testing costs for my little product line was over $27,000 for just over $30,000 worth of product. I cannot express the horrible feeling I had when I realized that I had made a mistake that was going to cost my family all of our money. …
I blame every one of the Energy and Commerce legislative staffers.
— Jolie Fay, crafter, SkippingHippos.com, guest post, AmendTheCPSIA.com
PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE from Ethel Everett, illustrator, Nursery Rhymes (1900), courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.
4 Comments
Well, don’t forget the nannies know best.
My favorite is always when they express eternal optimism that we businesspeople are just so creative that we’ll figure out a way to comply with CPSIA and stay in business. I don’t know anyone who can outsmart a Catch-22 without simply refusing to play the game.
In most other countries, there is a way to outsmart a Catch-22: you ignore the regulations and if some official catches you on it, you bribe him. It’s corrupt, but that’s what it takes to make a statist system work. At present, if you tried this in America you’d get arrested, but as America continues to adopt statism as the new American way, it will eventually catch up with the rest of the world in the practice of corruption and bribery as well.
GregS: The problem is that a lot of these small manufacturers don’t sell their products directly to consumers; they sell through big distributors, and those distributors are very easy targets for regulators.