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First, Nancy Cowles, executive director of Kids in Danger, reacted negatively to my calling GoodGuide a consumer group. She agreed with my assessment of negative spillover, but wrote to me, "Not only were Zhu Zhu's hurt by the erroneous report, consumer groups may end up being more affected by your and other media's getting it wrong about who did the report."
She has a point. GoodGuide is for-profit business. It is a company not a consumer group.
I got it wrong, and apparently so did a lot of other writers. My search via Google News for the terms GoodGuide and consumer group triggered more than 2,000 hits. Many bloggers got it wrong too. The same search via Google Blogs triggered more than 200 hits.
Cowles, incidentally, stressed that she is not attempting to disparage GoodGuide, but simply wanted to point out that it's not a consumer group.
What is GoodGuide? It describes itself as a Certified B Corporation. That designation is the creation of a Berwyn, Pa. based non-profit group, B-Lab, which sets and monitors legal and other standards for companies seeking the designation.
B Corporations favor certain social and environmental causes. They include commitments to those causes in their governing documents. There are about 220 B Corporations, representing $1.1 billion in annual revenue in 54 industries, according to the B-Lab website.
Interestingly, my quick review of the list of B Corporations found CPSIA-regulated small businesses, with numerous selling children's products such as apparel and toys.
Meanwhile, Rick Woldenberg -- chairman of the company Learning Resources and chairman of the Alliance for Children's Product Safety, an organization of CPSIA-regulated small businesses -- reacted negatively to my criticism of his calling consumer groups terrorists.
I stand by my criticism. I believe that certain words -- visceral terms like terrorist, rapist, murderer -- should be reserved for the actual perpetrators of heinous and brutal acts of violence. I believe that using them otherwise, no matter how justified the user's anger, is inexcusable.
Sean Oberle is publisher of Product Safety Letter, Product Safety Forum, and Product Safety Daily. Reach him at (301) 229-1027, seanoberle@productsafetyletter.com
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