Sunday, June 04, 2006
Warning Labels are becoming useless
I get really annoyed with the safety labels on products these days - because of the fear of being sued, manufacturers place every possible warning they can think of on the products they build.
What this does is make a simple product like, say a toaster have a 4 page SAFETY SECTION, which, lets face it - none of us are going to read. They have things like - 'dont use the toaster outdoors in a thunderstorm', or 'dont use the toaster in a bathroom' . All these warnings are put there because some poor fool somewhere once did this, or some executive *thinks* that someone might do this at some stage in the future.
The outcome of this is is that if there was some specific *real* warning on that product which is non obvious which should be labelled, no one is going to see it, because no one will wade through 4 pages of obvious crap to find the real serious warning. (e.g. This toaster catchs fire if you try to toast crumpets)
Another example is medicines. They all used to have specific warnings, but these days there is a 12 page printout (times new roman 3 point) showing every possible bad thing that could happen. Almost all medicine warinngs include 'in extreme cases may cause coma or even death'. Great - that is really helpful. Now I dont know the difference between taking your pills or drinking a bucket of cyanide, since both lead to death and the warning labels would be similar.
There are some products which are seriously dangerous. Some cleaning products should NOT be used indoors, some medicines should NOT be taken with 'x', and some irons/tumble dryers should not be left unattended (overheating and catch fire). But you will never know which ones, because it is now one of the 46 dot points in the list of what not to do with your new product, and after dot point 23 'dont use if you are drunk and flying a jumbo jet' your eyes would have glazed over and you'd miss the ONE REAL IMPORTANT WARNING.
I think they should keep their ever increasing list of stupid scenarios on what not to do with the product (just to keep the laywers happy, because as we know the stupid people who do these things never read instructions anyway), but have a big red letter warning section at the start of this saying 'THIS IS THE REAL IMPORTANT BIT' and have 1 - 3 warnings there. If there are any more than 3 serious warnings then what the hell is your product doing on the market anyway?
My favourite warning label is of course:
"Warning - Contains Peanuts" (on a peanut butter jar)
What this does is make a simple product like, say a toaster have a 4 page SAFETY SECTION, which, lets face it - none of us are going to read. They have things like - 'dont use the toaster outdoors in a thunderstorm', or 'dont use the toaster in a bathroom' . All these warnings are put there because some poor fool somewhere once did this, or some executive *thinks* that someone might do this at some stage in the future.
The outcome of this is is that if there was some specific *real* warning on that product which is non obvious which should be labelled, no one is going to see it, because no one will wade through 4 pages of obvious crap to find the real serious warning. (e.g. This toaster catchs fire if you try to toast crumpets)
Another example is medicines. They all used to have specific warnings, but these days there is a 12 page printout (times new roman 3 point) showing every possible bad thing that could happen. Almost all medicine warinngs include 'in extreme cases may cause coma or even death'. Great - that is really helpful. Now I dont know the difference between taking your pills or drinking a bucket of cyanide, since both lead to death and the warning labels would be similar.
There are some products which are seriously dangerous. Some cleaning products should NOT be used indoors, some medicines should NOT be taken with 'x', and some irons/tumble dryers should not be left unattended (overheating and catch fire). But you will never know which ones, because it is now one of the 46 dot points in the list of what not to do with your new product, and after dot point 23 'dont use if you are drunk and flying a jumbo jet' your eyes would have glazed over and you'd miss the ONE REAL IMPORTANT WARNING.
I think they should keep their ever increasing list of stupid scenarios on what not to do with the product (just to keep the laywers happy, because as we know the stupid people who do these things never read instructions anyway), but have a big red letter warning section at the start of this saying 'THIS IS THE REAL IMPORTANT BIT' and have 1 - 3 warnings there. If there are any more than 3 serious warnings then what the hell is your product doing on the market anyway?
My favourite warning label is of course:
"Warning - Contains Peanuts" (on a peanut butter jar)
