Here’s a story that makes you wonder what sort of tools the workers at Mattel’s factories use. A “shank” (a blade wrapped in electrical tape, to be exact) was found inside a sealed Polly Pocket toy purchased at Walmart.
Mattel apologized for the incident, saying:
“We apologize to the family that they found that in the toy. No matter how it got there, or what the cause of the placement of that object in the toy was. So we apologize to the family, and we’d also like to send a replacement toy to make her Christmas happy and bright.”
The family that bought the toy was sufficiently horrified that they declined a replacement.
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Good comments people, you make engadget look like early 1900s slapstick.
polly’s been around the block once or twice eh
Didn’t this story break on Christmas day?
Polly Pocket : jihad edition
“http://consumerist.com/tag/vidoes/”
Vidoes? C’mon.
Welcome to made in China. This is kinda a nonstory – a tool got left in a toy by an overworked, tired and stressed worker on an assembly line. The fact that it is a shiv means little. Even if the factory had proper tools for use, workers many times will construct or buy their own to help them get the job done.
If they were smart, they would have ebayed the shiv. Just my opinion.
A large percentage of toys are manufactured by captive workers. Prison labor is big business. Many countries which provide cheap labor for the global economy use camp and prison labor to lower the total labor costs. Other countries capture religious or political dissidents for this purpose. Other countries import drugs and then incarcerate the users to fill their prison labor programs. The sneakers you wear, the toys your children play with, and the clothes you wear have a 78% chance of having been manufactured by captive labor.