It's been quite a while since i did CE, UL and CSA testing and conformities, but CE even back then was pretty worthless. It's just a self declaration. Only when the proverbial fan has been tainted with figurative feces, they will maybe act upon it.
And back then there was also this weird "China Export" logo that resembled the CE logo specifications for about 95%. The average consumer could not know the difference.
It also gives me a chuckle when i see this weird 'QC passed' stickers on components. Completely worthless.
Without registering every minute product variation with a testing certificate, how else would you handle this though? As much as I think regulators should be swinging the axe more than they do, from an engineering perspective it's impossible to actually do unless everything is locked down ISO 9001-style, especially for electronics and doubly so when software is in the mix.
Lying on a self-declaration should always be taken very seriously, but I feel like it often isn't. For example, if Amazon is found to have fake-CE marked good for sale after it's been reported to them, the penalties should make even their eyes water and have their responsible people shuffling nervously.
There's a limited amount you can do for Temu direct-shipped deathtraps (I suppose if you went to an tech-brained extreme, you could use the x-rays of packages at the border that they already do and have something like AI-based statistical recognition of known-bad products). But there's also not nothing you can do if you really cared. For example, you could imagine a registry of every single tested-bad product, photos of it, where it came from, known aliases, sightings in the wild and so on.
> And back then there was also this weird "China Export" logo
I am pretty sure that is a myth. It's just a sloppy, not-quite-to-spec logo. There is no China Export scheme. Maybe it was a sneaky deliberate way to avoid being hit with a "fake CE mark" charge but instead argue it's "no CE mark", but in either case it's not a legal product if the product needed a CE mark in the first place.
Not hammering down on that hard and fast is what allows that kind of thing. Recall the products you see with that and the retailers and importers would quickly get the message. Test products preemptively and publish the results. Allow it to fester and you get problems and people actually die.
You are right. There should be far far more quality checks.
There can be an enourmous difference between UL compliance and CE self declaration. No standard (normal?) business is actively trying to kill its customers, but there are a lot of small companies that love to make a profit by cutting a lot of corners.
That is one of the reasons these kinds of certifications exist in the first place and people should be able to rely on them. You cannot rely on CE and hope for the best.
Having certain UL certifications require rigirous and continuous testing in certified labs or environments. It makes things super expensive, but also very trustworthy. The fines, investigations and lawsuits are no joke. Not even for huge megacorporations. I've seen documentation where for instance General Electric had 48 hours to fix a problem or the product cannot ever be sold ever again, there would be a complete recall on their costs and the company could face banning from doing business completely.
I once had companies design power distribution units that required UL compliance. Price tag for a single unit was pretty insane. Around $400 per unit if i remember correctly. No consumer in their right mind would ever pay that if there is a market with a zillion cheap alternatives.
Even back then the market was flooded with fake CE crap. But it's also incredibly cheap, so lots of people (myself included for some things) buy the cheap stuff. They want the full experience, but don't want to (cannot?) pay top notch for it.
I get why. I get the process where everybody wants to make money. But it wil continue to demand lives, because there will always be people cutting corners if they somehow can and there will always be people who will buy the cheap stuff, because they want it.
In theory for something like a CE marked power adapter, a manufacturer should be prepared to be challenged on why they feel able to certify it. For example, they could present their testing certificates from some testing lab and show that they haven't changed anything that would materially affect the results.
I suspect that some manufacturers do not get challenged on that nearly as often as they should when they sell into channels like Temu and no-name importers. And so they can skate away with just not doing the certs, so they don't need to do the design work to meet them, and so they don't do it. If anyone asks, you just just don't sell to them.
Whereas if they sell, say, 500k units to Costco, they will be required to produce that paperwork because Costco is taking on the liability in the market and they can't just vamoose when something explodes.
It doesn't always work: things that have been "correctly" CE-marked sometimes do turn out to be unsafe and get recalled, but I suspect the real problems are things where the CE mark is fake and no one is stamping on heads in the way that UL does if you take their name in vain. Once it is known that testing and certification is statistically optional as long as you sell to the right channels, someone will do it unless they are stopped.
Because retailers take the legal responsibility for what they sell to the public. In the same way statutory returns go to the retailer, not the manufacturer (unless the manufacturer has volunteered an extra warranty to use on top). They can take it up with the manufacturers if they want.
The customer doesn't enter into a contract with the manufacturer when they buy an item from a retailer. They do so with the retailer.
Which is not to say the agencies shouldn't also ban the product from the market. But that doesn't absolve the retailer of their duties.
This feels gross. If the manufacturers are not held accountable, then they will never stop making shite products. If the retailers are knowingly selling shite products, then sure. But most of the time, retailers are just selling products they think customers will want to buy. Lots of shite products get returned to the manufacturer when the retailers cannot move them, or other issues arise from the products.
The retailers are the front line for returns as that's the point of contact for the customer. That's just the nature of the beast. If a company establishes itself as a maker of decent products that retailers can trust suddenly gets lazy/cheap/profit focused to the point they cheapen their products, it is not the retailer's fault.
> This feels gross. If the manufacturers are not held accountable, then they will never stop making shite products. If the retailers are knowingly selling shite products, then sure. But most of the time, retailers are just selling products they think customers will want to buy. Lots of shite products get returned to the manufacturer when the retailers cannot move them, or other issues arise from the products.
Retailers shrugging their shoulders is what I would call gross. You shouldn't sell a product to the public that you're not willing to stand behind. Retailers have a lot more ways to protect themselves from from shoddy manufacturers - and, fundamentally, operate at the kind of scale where they can do so - than customers have to protect themselves from shoddy anything.
How does a customer of a retailer hold a manufacturer accountable when they have no relationship with said manufacturer?
> But most of the time, retailers are just selling products they think customers will want to buy.
I don't think retailers are nearly as helpless or unwitting as that. Amazon definitely know they have unsafe products on the shelves no matter how dumb they may play.
> The retailers are the front line for returns as that's the point of contact for the customer
They're also the front line for consumer safety reporting, by law. All companies (not only retailers, actually) have a statutory duty to report unsafe consumer goods, even in the US, and not only for CPC/GCC certified goods. When a customer reports an unsafe product to their retailer, the retailer should forward this information, along with batch codes, origins, sourcing information etc (which the customer obviously will not know). This is the early-warning system that leads to things like recalls, withdrawals and so on, before something causes widespread harm.
I take it you're not in the US? Retailers here generally must warrant against DOA, but almost anything beyond that can absolutely be shoved off onto the manufacturer.
Those who wonder why Americans can get so many things so cheaply - yes, we have lower tariffs (or at least did), but also we don't have those minimum-duration warranties that allow the consumer to return to the place of purchase as much as a year or more after purchase and demand satisfaction from the retailer. Those are expensive to provide.
Do not assume that the only reason people return items while claiming a defect is that there is, in fact, a defect.
Yes, if a technically-savvy person tells me "I've done X, Y, and Z, and it still doesn't work", I will believe them. A member of the general public? Even if they aren't scammers, it is entirely possible that they will eat up hours of effort at the store trying to do this.
It's obviously not free. I've seen a low-staff store - I was in a pharmacy (erm, if you're not in the US or Canada, our pharmacies carry a lot more than just health products, though in this case I was there to buy a product you would find in one in the UK or Europe) last week in Canada where they didn't have a cashier at the front. Only the pharmacist and a couple of techs at the back. If you needed assistance rather than self-checkout, you had to ring a bell to summon someone.
> I've seen a low-staff store - I was in a pharmacy
Walgreens, CVS, and the like are horrible to their retail employees and only care about retail business to the extent it drives more Rx business. You'll be happier using an independent pharmacy or one inside a retail business that would exist without the pharmacy, like a grocery store, and statistically safer, too.
They make a poor example if you want to extrapolate to other retailers.
It was for a non-prescription item that wasn’t in the grocery stores I had tried, and I was on a trip. You make do with what is available. And it was Canada - no Walgreens or CVS in Banff.
It's called a CE mark or equivalent, there is already a system, penalties and tests.