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Product Safety and Litigation
In a world that is full of eager consumers ready and willing to find some new way to make the easy buck, litigations involving product safety issues are no stranger to this model. Although it may seem in some instances that consumers are merely ?playing a dramatic role' in order to bring in some extra money, some cases can be clearly traced to management and the poor decisions made in the process. These particular cases where management has made detrimental decisions that have inevitably come back to bite them are going to be the primary topic of research. There are those cases where the blame has been labeled as mismanagement when it was clearly a display of ?impeccable acting'; however, those situations will not be under the spotlight for discussion.
The main issue, or rather litigation case, that is going to be discussed in its entirety involves a lawsuit against Wal-Mart after several injuries occurred in not only its stores but also its Sam's Club warehouses as well. These injuries that were inflicted on several consumers involved a set of work-out machines that unfortunately caused damage to the consumers by breaking and falling apart while in use. The main issue at hand here is not only the product safety, but more importantly the mismanagement that occurred as a result of these ?accidents'. Wal-Mart and the manufacturers of the work-out machines, Ikon, found themselves in an unfortunate lawsuit by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, CPSC. The direct issue that overrides all others, in particular the product defects, is that neither Wal-Mart or Ikon informed CPSC of these incid ...