Parents beware: Agencies urge vigilant toy shopping

Bill Sartain sells toys in his Foothill Village store, Tutoring Toys, and he says customers have come in with concerns about safety in the past several months, as manufacturers have recalled millions of popular toys.

Those worries resurfaced Tuesday when federal regulators urged shoppers to be vigilant and highlighted a broad array of hazards, including the lead-based paint that forced the manufacturers' recalls. The regulators urged parents to read warning labels, follow safety guidelines and monitor toy recalls.

Consumer groups also warned that they found numerous cases where toys that posed a choking hazard or lead danger had improperly made it to store shelves. "Consumers looking for toys still face an industry full of safety loopholes," said the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

Three days before the start of the busy shopping season, Nancy Nord, acting chief of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, issued safety tips in a two-page release that called on parents to "stay informed" by reading product warning labels and signing up for direct e-mail notification of recalls at www.cpsc.gov.

Sartain echoed those warnings, and said that as a retailer, he tries to go well beyond the measures most parents would take to ensure safety. If that means pulling a toy, he will, although the only recalls from his store were Thomas the Tank Engine sets, which contained lead paint, and Aquadots, a toy-tainted with a date-rape drug. But he has plenty of safe options to offer, such as wooden train sets and European or American made stuffed animals.

"We have a lot of questions and a lot of people intentionally not buying Chinese toys," he said.

A majority of his toys — 60 percent — are manufactured outside of China, whose manufacturers have been blamed for the lead paint and product recalls. But the Chinese-made toys that he does sell are generally manufactured for European and American companies that have good reputations, he said.

"The companies we do business with that manufacture toys in China are smaller, and they have people on-site," Sartain said.

Ashley Holbrook, a Salt Lake mother, said that she shops at small stores like Tutoring Toys because she trusts them to be more wary of safety concerns than national chains.

"I trust them to go through the toys and don't think they would sell anything dangerous," she said.

The news release from the CPSC highlighted a broad array of potential toy safety hazards. Among the biggest toy hazards cited were: