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Last spring, when we bought TRex all her gardening stuff, one thing we got for her was the cute caterpillar shovel pictured here. She merrily used it all summer and through the winter (for moving snow, of course). Then, when she & I were at Target looking for new rain boots for her last Wednesday, I noticed a sign posted that this shovel and handful of other products from the same line had been recalled due to excessive lead levels. I commented to her that we were going to have to bring her bug shovel back because the paint on it could make kids sick and they'd give us our money back so we could get her a new shovel to replace it. Thankfully she's not a kid who was ever real big on putting things in her mouth.Yeah, that's how these things are SUPPOSED to go. Let me just say I'm glad I didn't try to do the return when she was with me. I walked up to the customer service desk this morning and showed them the shovel and said, "This was recalled, so I'd like my refund." They looked at me. "Do you have your receipt?" Um, no, I bought it a year ago. They looked at the big board of recalls. "It's not on the board." Well, there's a sign in the gardening department. "Let me page the person in charge of the board." She wasn't working until 2 this afternoon. They paged a couple of other people. They refused to believe me that it had been recalled. Finally I said, "You know what, I'll just go take a picture of the sign with my phone and bring it back to show you." They told me to just take down the sign and bring it to them, so that's what I did. CS flunkie reads it and says, "But this expired January 31st." Excuse me? First off, that sign was NOT posted in the gardening section until sometime last week - I was in there looking for boots for her over the weekend (on 4/5, to be precise) and it wasn't there. Second off, recalls EXPIRE? Because suddenly this item is going to STOP having toxic paint on it? She asks me for my receipt again. I say, "I don't have it; I bought this almost a year ago." She says, "Oh, yeah, last year's were recalled." Yes, we've established that. At some point she had paged the store manager who was now listening to the conversation. The manager told her to try to return it even though the recall was expired and after scanning my driver's license something like 20 times (thus guaranteeing that I will not EVER be allowed to return anything to Target without a receipt again) they found something they could call it that it was willing to accept and quite grudgingly gave me my $3.25 in cash.
Moral of the story: if you're buying kids' stuff at Target, keep an eye on their recall board (usually located next to customer service) because you only get 4 months to act on it. And save ALL OF YOUR RECEIPTS because, well, they really don't like taking things back without them, even if you bought the products ages and ages ago.
I'm still debating whether or not to call the CPSC to find out if they really can put time limits on recalls and/or writing a letter to Target to complain.
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