[throwaway82931]

This safety risk applies to anything else you buy on Amazon. Not just pottery, but all dinnerware. Not just dinnerware, but also items like children's toys.

If you can't trust the origins of pottery on Amazon, why can you trust the origins of anything on Amazon?

And if you can't trust the origins of anything, you can't count on safety regulations and standards that you take for granted.

[derefr]

> If you can't trust the origins of pottery on Amazon, why can you trust the origins of anything on Amazon?

Because many (most?) categories of goods are consolidated into an effective oligopoly of reputable brands, where these brands push competitors out of the market in basically every respect — in brand-recognition, in advertising payments, in number of reviews, in review score, in "link juice", etc.

So even when there are garbage Shenzhen e-waste products being marketed on the same website, in the same category as the thing you're looking for, you won't see them if there are real products to be had, because the first five pages are all the real products. (Unless you're doing very specific searches, using very unusual keywords that the well-known brands would never think to buy.)

This is why the experience of shopping on Amazon is a different experience than shopping on a site like Wish or AliExpress: Amazon has both the e-waste and the stuff from well-known brands, and if you stay "on the happy path" of using the site, you'll end up mostly seeing stuff from well-known brands.

The only time this falls down is when there are no reputable brands in a category. Such as in the category of kitsch stoneware. For those categories, Amazon and Wish/AliExpress become effectively the same site.

> And if you can't trust the origins of anything, you can't count on safety regulations and standards that you take for granted.

I mean... most of the things I buy on Amazon, I'm not putting in my mouth. What's the worst a christmas ornament is going to do to me? Get glitter on the floor?

I do understand the cases you're referring to — electronics and such — but in those cases, there are import regulations that actually prevent things like "burns your house down" electronics from coming into the country, with actively-maintained blacklists of products. Some few dangerous items might slip through the cracks and get imported anyway (especially at first, in unusual+novel categories like "negative-ion wellness products"), but one email to US Customs is usually enough to get these things sorted out, and the whole category will disappear from the store the next day. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0)

[VRay]

What the hell are you talking about? No-name Shenzhen manufacturers rocket to the #1 slot all the time, through a combination of being cheaper and literally paying for 5 star reviews

Just search for anything on Amazon right now and you can see what I mean. I ran afoul of this when I needed a humidifier last year, but just now I searched for "phone charger" and the front page was mostly brands that exist solely on Amazon and some tiny Facebook page

[jrib]

Yes, I don't buy anything that goes on my body or in my body from Amazon. A few years ago I had a bad experience with some lotion for dry skin. I could tell something was different compared to the product I usually bought at Target or the grocery store. Around the same time there seemed to be a lot of press explaining commingling of stock at Amazon warehouses.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

If I can’t trust Amazon to handle this issue why should I trust their grocery stores to not sell pesticide contaminated foods?

Similarly, why should I trust Walmart to not sell similarly contaminated items in store? If Amazon can get away with, wittingly or not poisoning, their customers, then as history shows it is a short matter of time before their competitors cut the same corner.

[throwaway82931]

Amazon has a long history of selling hazardous, poisonous goods on its website:

https://www.insider.com/amazon-selling-toxic-toys-lead-poiso...

> Amazon has been selling thousands of products that have failed federal safety tests, including children's toys containing four to 411 times the safe limit of lead.

I am not aware of similar problems with poisonous products being sold through the physical storefronts of Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh.

However, if in fact Amazon's physical grocery stores are just as bad as its website, then you absolutely should not trust Amazon grocery stores not to sell you pesticide contaminated foods.