Many of the millions of people who shop on Amazon.com see it as if it were an American big-box store, a retailer with goods deemed safe enough for customers.
In practice, Amazon has increasingly evolved like a flea market. It exercises limited oversight over items listed by millions of third-party sellers, many of them anonymous, many in [well-known cheater] China, some offering scant information.
One of our newspapers doing what newspapers are ‘sposed to do.
A Wall Street Journal investigation found 4,152 items for sale on Amazon.com Inc. ’s site that have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled or are banned by federal regulators—items that big-box retailers’ policies would bar from their shelves.
Among those items, at least 2,000 listings for toys and medications lacked warnings about health risks to children.
Great. Ebay digging into Jeff B’s margins? Coming up: auctions?
Buyer, beware — as usual.
via WSJ
Blithe Spirit 