Notifying consumers about recalls should morph into a national high-tech priority like putting a man on the moon. As Timothy Aeppel explains in todays' THE WALL STREET JOURNAL there are so many recalls that most of them don't get on consumers' radar screens. I know.
It took a fellow shopper when the lettuce contamination outbreak was going on to tell me not to buy any of the heads in the supermarket. [Yes, they were still being sold, cute.] No, I hadn't been paying attention to the news. Like most Americans, I work too many hours a day. Plaintiff law firm Marler Clark runs 12 blogs on those kinds of food recalls. But that's just my point: Such red flags need to be linked easily, in a user-friendly but in-your-face way and cheaply to all consumers.
That's the only way I keep up with the lead-paint toy and children paraphernalia items that are continually recalled. It's my network of bloggers, such as financial-markets expert Todd Sullivan, who flag me immediately on each. Otherwise, I would have missed Mattel's fourth and the recent Ugly Teeth one.
So, if we did put a man on the moon, come on, we can apply technology to this recall-notification problem. Aeppel cites research by Dirk Gibson, associate professor of communications at University of New Mexico, which found that on the average there are 28 recalls a week. That adds up to 1456 recalls a year. That means there are potentially almost 1500 products that could be endangering our life and probably we're clueless about most of their defects, contaminants and failure rate.
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