In 2006, Jennifer—the co-founder of popular parenting/consumer advocacy site Z Recommends—took her two-and-a-half-year-old to the bathroom at the local Toys R Us store. What she didn’t know was that this particular store featured the awesome striking power of the Action Toilet Stall with Collapsible Mom Trap! As she closed the door, the entire partition fell over on top of her and her daughter. Jennifer managed to protect her daughter from harm, but in the two years since the event, she’s developed chronic pain from the accident—and the response from Toys R Us has been “don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
You may think a veteran consumer advocate would be able to resolve an incident like this with the company fairly quickly, but Jennifer’s experiences over the past two years show just how difficult corporations can be when you try to get them to own up to their responsibility. Just look at how hard they tried to avoid talking to her a few days after the accident:
I left a message with the company’s “Risk Management” office, which didn’t call me back. The next day, I called again and got someone. They assigned me a “file number” and a “case worker,” but told me that the case worker they were assigning me was out on medical leave for an indefinite period. This concerned me, and I protested, but the representative assured that if I needed anything, “anyone who answers the phone will be able to help.”
Later, I received a letter from Toys ‘R’ Us which stated that due to their “inability” to reach me via telephone they were contacting me via letter. My home phone number is a VoIP line, so I logged into my account and checked the incoming calls to my home phone. Not one was identified as coming from Toys ‘R’ Us or the corporate office’s area code.
Now Jennifer is suing Toys R Us (the trial is set for June), and today she’s revealed the details of the accident, as well as the consequences of it on her health.
Being a consumer advocate may not give you an edge in being taken seriously by a corporation, but it does give you the drive you need to publicize a company’s negligence. We can’t wait to see how this develops in the coming months.
If and when we get to trial, I will be not only the plaintiff but a blogger on the scene. Now that we have a court date set, what’s truly ironic is that we have a well-established model for this new project. This is what we do. We gather information, ask probing questions, parse out the answers, publicize our findings, and make an argument for how things should be. We’ve done it with Avent, Playtex, Sassy, Tupperware, Carter’s, and continue to apply pressure to companies to make them change for the better and respond to what they’ve done. We go to trade shows in part to introduce ourselves to new vendors and discover all of the great new children’s products that come online every year. But we also go to put faces to names for people we’ve dealt with over the previous year, and you know what? When we show up at the booth of someone we’ve worked with on a contentious consumer issue, they either groan or cheer. And we like it that way.
The difference, of course, is that it’s personal now – but so is the BPA Dr. Brown’s introduced to Z through her bottles before we knew about endocrine disruptors, or the skin lesions other people’s children suffered from onesies with the same likely chemical formulation our daughter wore, but did not react to, when she was an infant. Compassion means seeing harm to everyone, yourself included, in the harm that is done to others, and we’ve learned that lesson well, both through parenting and through blogging. In fact, I’d say that this merging of personal and social interests is at the heart of advocacy blogging, and we’re ready to show Toys ‘R’ Us how it’s done. Low-level chemical toxicity is an evolving field of knowledge, but basic maintenance is a question of simple procedures and the reinvestment of a modest share of corporate profits to ensure customer safety. It isn’t the sexiest way to spend your company’s money; doing it right means your efforts barely get noticed. But doing it wrong can have deadly consequences.
“How Toys ‘R’ Us can change your life” [Z Recommends] (Thanks to Jim!)
(Photo: Carey Tilden; photo of collapsed stall from Z Recommends)
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My first thought when I saw the picture of the fallen stall was “Holy shit! That would HURT!”
I read the original article, and she doesn’t sound sue-happy or “exited to blog the trial” to me. She sounds as if she is at the end of her rope. If this happened to me, I would be furious if the store did not at least pay my medical bills.
If indeed they KNEW the stall was loose and did nothing to maintain it – that is the question no one has asked. It seems to me that it’s the first question their lawyers would address.
I had a similar incident happen to me once. A phone booth in the parking lot of the apartment complex I lived in had a sliding door that had come off the track. The complex called the phone company repeatedly to come fix it, and they didn’t. One day I went to make a call and the door shut and trapped me inside. I pulled the door to try and get out, and it flew back and hit me in the face, cutting me over my eye. I had to have four stitches in the emergency room.
I wrote them a letter, and they paid the bill. The very next week, they took out the booth and put in a free-standing phone.
*excited, rather
@Applekid: Kinda like playing telephone!
I work at a children’s gym, and you’d think we’d be a magnet for lawsuits, but we haven’t been sued. Ever. In seventeen years. We have had some injuries, of course, but they happened in the natural course of athletic activities, and the parents have all seemed to understand the risk that gymnastics, and physical play entails. Now, if we had a bathroom stall fall on a customer who was sitting on the crapper, I expect that we might be sued…or we might not, because we treat our customers with compassion and gratitude for their patronage. We have strict guidelines on how to deal with injuries and follow up as well. I’m surprised that a company as large at Toys R Us doesn’t have some fairly straightforward policies and procedures on how to deal with in-store injuries in a way that minimizes the kind of bad faith feelings that lead to lawsuits.
@Corporate Guy: I think she also has a problem in the fact she didn’t report it to the store management at the time it happened. I imagine if I worked in their risk management department, and I got a call about an accident that occurred days before that went completely unreported at the time it happened, I’d be suspicious too.
@Pylon83: I’m not seeing that anywhere in her blog. Where are you getting that information from?
@Floraposte: It’s an inference from the blog post. She doesn’t say she reported it, and that’s a pretty big detail to leave out if she did. I will admit that it’s a big inference, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable one. To me, that seems like a huge part of the story: how the store manager handled it when it was reported to him. Her omission of that fact was either a huge, accidental omission, or an omission because it simply didn’t happen. If she did indeed report it, obviously my above statement is moot.
How’d she get the stall door open the first time without it falling over?
Geez, I stop coming to Consumerist for a few months and return to a plethora of disemvoweled posts in addition to the “blame the OP” that filled the commenting section when I left. Also, is Consumerist no longer run by Gawker Media? I see the tag at the bottom says “Consumer Media LLC”…
Chronic pain is nasty, my father has it from an incident while he was in the military.
@Namilia: Yeah, Gawker sold off Consumerist. As for the “Blame the OP”, its has been on the decline really. Certainly not as much as it was before. This thread has a disproportionate number of OP blamers. I think it is because maybe they dont know what a damper chronic pain is.
Seriously, like, over half of y’all seem to think she’s lying, which even for our blog is a pretty extreme number. Is it because her post isn’t as precise or structured as you like, but rather jumps around chronologically and focuses as much on her emotional journey as on the accident? Otherwise I can’t fathom the hostility toward her in the comments today.
@Pylon83, not, it’s not a big detail to leave out. For all you know, she may have gone through a dozen different procedural steps and only reported a couple of them. It’s quite obvious that the post is not meant to be a comprehensive step-by-step recount of the accident and its consequences. She is not making a case for you against TRU in the post. She is explaining, in broad strokes, what happened to her, and announcing that in June she’ll be going to court over a very personal case, which is relevant to her and (we assume) her readers, and (I assumed) our readers, because it’s so similar to the content covered by her blog and ours.
I don’t think you and the other give-her-no-quarter skeptics are deliberately misreading her post, but I do suspect that you’re not reading it as it’s intended, and that you’re looking for content that was never promised and that’s clearly not there–and as a consequence, you’ve decided she somehow doesn’t have a case.
She may or may not have a case, but assuming the basic facts are true–that a bathroom stall fell on her, that she required assistance to get it off of her and her kid, and that pain started after that and has yet to be properly diagnosed and treated–I’d like to think Consumerist readers are fair-minded enough to at least give her the benefit of the doubt. The idea that all chronic pain and undiagnosable injuries are scams is phenomenally stupid to me–just a few articles over the brain-body connection alone (read “The Itch” in the New Yorker 4-5 months ago, e.g.) should indicate otherwise.
@ZekeSulastin: It’s public humiliation, man! Don’t try to fill it in, it was worthless to begin with.
@Chris Walters: I suppose you and I will have to agree to disagree on that point. In my opinion, and judging from the comments a few other peoples as well, there is a convenient omission of details concerning certain events or non-events. She is extremely detailed with regard to what happened when it suits here story, and omits details or is vague when it does not. I don’t fault her for this, it’s exactly how one writes persuasively.
That said, I’m not persuaded and I don’t think we should be expected to take her at her word just because she runs a blog, is a consumer advocate, etc. If you’ll carefully read what I have written, I’ve not said explicitly whether I think she has a case or not. I’ve said I don’t think it’s a lock, and that there are some holes she’ll have to deal with. I haven’t said TRU wasn’t negligent. The reality of it is she’ll probably get a sympathetic jury to give her some money regardless of whether it’s deserved. I do not believe enough details have been provided for me to make a clear judgment with regard to whether or not TRU was negligent in this case. What I refuse to do is blindly take her side of the story as the truth and proceed to bash TRU for their negligence and irresponsibility.
Forums like this are useful for debating issues and discussing the details (or lack thereof) of the posts. All of that said, there are a number of comments on here that are indeed out of line. But I don’t think those of us who are simply questioning the details of her account, or opining as to whether or not there might be liability, is out of line. A few people have automatically jumped to the conclusion that TRU was negligent, and I think they should be called out on that. I don’t think calling those people out is out of line, and I think doing so contributes to the discussion.
My red flag is when she blamed Dr. Brown for exposing her baby to carcinogens through the bottle. I doubt Dr. Brown makes her baby bottles.
@redkamel: Dr. Brown doesn’t make baby bottles, he makes time machines out of Deloreans and stolen plutonium.
I’m so done with these broken reply links. Please fix them, someone!
I’m not surprised they didn’t throw the “upon entering our store, you unconditionally accept to have any claims against us heard and decided via arbitration of our choosing.”
Is this really the message they want to be sending? That if something bad happens the customer can go screw themselves…not even an apology? I mean what would have happened if just the kid was in there?
I’m keeping any kids I have out of these stores just because now I know they don’t give a crap about anyone or anything but their bottom line.
I can sympathize with this lady in regards to all the skeptics that start commenting anytime anyone dares make a complaint against those innocent, saintly corporations.
I placed a complaint on Planet Feedback about Victoria’s Secret, in regards to their website opting me into some stupid travel package when I made a purchase, resulting in a 100 dollar charge on my debit card a month later for the “travel membership”.
Anyway, I called the travel company and they told me I could cancel and get a refund, but I was still upset that a company like Victoria’s Secret took advantage of the fact that I was buying something from them, and let another company charge me 100 bucks for some stupid membership for something totally unrelated. Planet Feedback commented on my complaint, stating that I had a valid complaint because V.S. had been doing what is called an “opt-out”, as opposed to having to opt-in to the program, which is deceitful and a bad business practice.
My point is, regardless of how valid a complaint I had, and how even Planet Feedback agreed, I had no shortage of people calling me out for trying to “get a free lunch” and all kinds of things like that. There was no proof whatsoever that I was lying, people just like to assume things without even considering that it might have actually happened. You don’t have to automatically assume everyone is telling the truth, but you guys should give people the benefit of the doubt. Are you telling me it’s that hard for you to believe that a company might actually be wrong? Do we not read Consumerist?
When my gay buddy & were in the military, he was the safety advocate of our department. We’d go out for drinks & he’d send me home in his car trashed so he could leave with another hot man! The nerve!