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Don’t act like I’m the only one. In a cosmic failure of design, human children are strong enough to pull things over before they are hardy enough to survive blunt force trauma. “One child dies every two weeks from furniture tipping over in the home,” according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. “There are there injuries reported every hour — adding up to 25,400 per year.” From the standpoint of evolution, your child’s instincts will keep her safer sleeping in a goddamn tree than when she’s trying to pull the elf off the shelf.
IKEA — purveyors of Scandinavian conformity — announced a major settlement in a products liability case. They agreed to pay $50 million to three families whose children were crushed when their IKEA dresser toppled over. From NBC News:
After the death of [Ted McGee of Apple Valley, Minnesota], the third child killed by a Malm dresser, Ikea announced in June that it would recall at least 29 million dressers. At the time, the furniture retailer also announced it would stop selling its popular “Malm” series of products.
Prior to the recall, Ikea had launched a sweeping public relations campaign, urging customers who have unsecured Ikea dressers to request a free kit from the company to secure them.
Despite the millions of dressers in the United States, Ikea reported it had distributed just 300,000 kits to customers.
To be a parent is to live in fear all the time because everything can kill your children. Everything. The internet has at least one story of every single thing killing a child. But you can’t really act on those fears, or else you end up living in a rubber house with your kid in a clear plastic ball.
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Obviously, the settlement and recall suggest that IKEA’s Malm dressers were perhaps more dangerous than your average storage unit. But you can’t really expect manufactures to fully child-proof everything they sell, because that’s impossible. My couch is pretty “secure.” But it wasn’t designed to withstand a four-year-old putting his full weight on the back end while he orders his brother to get the ball out from under the frame. Couches don’t know that children actively try to kill themselves multiple times every hour.
It’s probably cold comfort to the families, but it sounds like IKEA did what we can reasonably expect: avoid the problem, then offer to fix the problem, then recall the problem, and finally pay out the families affected by the problem. I don’t think the law could make them do any more.
In the meantime, I have to go make sure that my cookie jar is superglued to the counter-top.
Ikea Reaches $50 Million Wrongful Death Settlement Over Falling Dressers [NBC News]
Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.