Looks like China is at it again. Hong Kong authorities just found melamine in more products made in China, including drinks, ice cream, and yogurt. If you recall, not long ago U.S. authorities discovered melamine in supposedly premium pet food from China was chocked full of industrial melamine and ruining the kidneys and killing thousands of pets. My dog died on that one.
Then of course there was toxins in toothpastes exported from China, anti-freeze elements, if memory services, and there are warnings about anti-mold chemicals in Chinese-made furniture that creates allergies, rashes, all sorts of stuff. None of it is good. A lot of it is lethal. And even more of it is disturbing. It appears what was once regarded as a bargain, meaning Chinese goods, is no longer a bargain.
But China will do what China does. One woman, her family had Scandanavian retail furniture store for about thirty years, in Los Angeles, told me that the Chinese manufacturers will cheat on the chemicals and products they use. When the American examiners come, they will drag out the compliant stuff, and then, once the Americans leave, out again comes the cheap, toxic compounds. Lovely.
The mean thing is whether the retailers here will continue to sell the potentially dangerous goods from China. If you are a retailer and continue to do so, it can adversely affect your business. If you don’t believe it, a case in point are the two women I saw in Marshall’s passing on ceramic cookware that was made in China. They chose the ceramic cookware from Portugal instead, but didn’t buy the quantity they had intended to, orginally. These were Russian women, relatively recent immigrants who still had their accents. They came from a country that had a scarcity of goods. But now that they were in the United States, no way they were buying inferior or dangerous product.
These are hard times, economically speaking. Business is not to be taken lightly. Consumers are not to be mistreated. You should be hiring courteous sales personnel who actually provide service. Run background checks on these people and train them for their jobs. And, most importantly, try not to poison your customers. There aren’t all that many to go around at the moment. Their loss would be noticed.
