The Consumer Memo, 11/24:Safety regulator promises swift action on mammoth crib recall

Biggest ever crib recallThe head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission promised swift action to get dangerous products off the market, after acknowledging Tuesday that it didn’t move quickly enough on a record recall of more than 2 million cribs linked to four deaths.

“We were not advancing this case as quickly as possible,” Chairman Inez Tenenbaum said in an interview with The Associated Press. “So, I put all of the resources for the agency on this project so that they could accomplish this goal of recalling the crib.”

At issue are some 2.1 million drop-side cribs made by Stork Craft Manufacturing of Canada. Four infants suffocated in the cribs.

CPSC said the recall involves 1.2 million cribs in the United States and almost 1 million in Canada, where Stork Craft is based. Sales of the cribs being recalled date back to 1993 and nearly 150,000 of the cribs carry the Fisher-Price logo.

Drop-side cribs have one side that moves up and down to allow parents, especially shorter adults, to lift children from the cribs more easily. There have been 110 incidents of the drop-side detaching from the Stork Craft cribs, according to the agency.

In the case of Stork Craft and other drop-side cribs, the hardware used to put the crib together can break, deform or become missing after years. There also can be problems with assembly mistakes by the crib owner.

Parents often take the crib apart after one child has grown out of it, and then reassemble the crib later for another baby — and that can lead to parts that aren’t assembled properly. The hardware and misassembly problems can cause the drop-side to detach, creating a dangerous V-like space between the drop-side and the crib mattress, where a child can become trapped and suffocate.

Costly crash

EBay Inc.’s Web-site crash on Nov. 21 may have cost merchants about 80 percent of their sales for the day, according to ChannelAdvisor Corp., which helps retailers sell on the site. Shoppers searching the site for products such as Apple Inc.’s iPod got a blank page or an error message that the site was unable to run the requested search. EBay may face more disruptions as listing volumes peak during the holiday shopping season, ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo said.

EBay’s search engine was down for most of the day after a worker made a change to the system, causing it to crash, said John Pluhowski, a spokesman for eBay. The technical issue “resulted from a surge in live listings” ahead of the holiday season, the company said.

Toy hazards
Holiday shoppers should look out for toy hazards such as small parts, loud sounds, soft plastics and lead contamination, consumer advocates warned Tuesday. These dangers were highlighted by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in its 24th annual “Trouble in Toyland” report, the first since sweeping consumer safety legislation went into effect earlier this year.

“This is definitely a time when people are going to be thinking about making purchases for the holidays, so we want people to be aware of these hazards,” said Elizabeth Hitchcock, public health advocate for U.S. PIRG.

The organization focused on four hazards: small parts that can choke children younger than 3-years-old, loud toys that can cause hearing damage, lead-tainted toys and soft plastic toys that contain chemicals called phthalates.

Hitchcock encouraged parents to use , specially designed for use with mobile phones, to look up toy hazards while they are shopping.

Continental fined
Continental Airlines Inc. was fined $50,000 because one of its express carriers stranded passengers in August all night on a plane on the ground in Rochester, Minn., the U.S. Transportation Department said. Passengers were aboard a 50-seat jet operated by ExpressJet Holdings Inc. in Rochester, 90 miles south of Minneapolis, on a flight that had been diverted.

Gas usage falls
Gasoline consumption in the U.S. fell 1.4 percent from a year ago, the first year-on-year decline in two months, according to a report by MasterCard Inc.