A no-brainer, you'd think

Andrew Martin has an article in The New York Times about the continuing struggle over cribs:

At the back of a cavernous warehouse along a rough-and-tumble waterfront in Bayonne, New Jersey, an area has been swept clean of boxes and forklifts to make way for baby safety. This is a testing laboratory for the largest crib maker in the world. Eight hours a day, five days a week, cribs are beaten and battered by machines, subjected to the kind of malevolence a demonic toddler could only dream of doling out. “We look for structural problems,” said Joseph Shamie, co-president of the company, Delta Children’s Products. “And we look to see if screws loosen.”
As of last month, the company does not have much of a choice. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued new regulations for cribs that the authorities say are the toughest in the world. The most pronounced change is that drop-side cribs, long a nursery staple, are prohibited from being sold. But manufacturers must also strengthen the crib slats and mattress supports, make crib hardware more durable and subject their products to tougher testing. “Our standard is so rigorous that a new, compliant crib has to go through more than 75,000 cycles of testing (shake tests, mattress support tests, and slat tests) to get certified,” Scott Wolfson, the safety commission spokesman, said in an email.
But even as the new standards took effect on 28 June, some manufacturers had not had all of their cribs certified by testing laboratories, frustrating some retailers who have been stuck with cribs that they are not permitted to sell. Manufacturers discontinued other cribs that most likely would not have met the new standards, so retailers sold them at steep discounts or gave them to charities before the rules took effect.
At the Baby Boudoir store in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the owner, James Vieira, said some of his cribs were in quarantine, with a sticker saying For Display Purposes Only, until he gets a green light saying they pass muster. He estimated that he gave 150 cribs to charity and sold 25 cribs at the last minute at fire-sale prices. “We were practically giving them away,” said Mr. Vieira, who estimated he would have to toss forty or fifty cribs into the trash.
Small retailers had sought an extension to carry out the new rules, but the safety commission voted it down, three to two, deepening a partisan rift among commissioners as the Democrats prevailed. The commissioners did agree unanimously to grant an eighteen-month extension for day care facilities and hotels to switch to cribs that comply with the new standard.
“The whole crib standard saga is a good illustration of how not to regulate,” said Commissioner Nancy A. Nord, a Republican. “We rushed the standard out without doing the hard work upfront to understand the impact of the regulation.” But the commission’s Democratic chairwoman, Inez M. Tenenbaum, dismissed her Republican colleagues’ complaints. “After dozens of babies had tragically been entrapped and died, and millions of defective cribs had been recalled, the actions of this commission to ensure the swift movement to market of only safer cribs undoubtedly was justified,” she said in a statement.
Vieira, the Massachusetts retailer, said his complaint was not with the regulation. “It’s certainly a good thing we are making cribs better,” he said. “We didn’t have a problem with the regulation. We have a problem with how it was implemented.”
The retailers’ complaints, however qualified, have received little sympathy from parents whose children have died in cribs. “You can’t tell the safety of a crib by looking at it, and you certainly can’t maintain its safety because it met weak industry standards in place prior to 2010,” three sets of parents wrote in an open letter to the industry. “Those that killed our sons also met those same inadequate standards.”
The new crib standards were the first major revisions in thirty years, and were approved by the Consumer Product Safety Commission after years of agitation by advocacy groups, parents of children who had been killed, and news organizations, particularly The Chicago Tribune. Since 2007, the safety commission has recalled more than eleven million cribs, ten million of which had drop sides. (Manufacturers voluntarily stopped making drop-side cribs two years ago.)
“The standard was unchanged for years because of industry stonewalling,” said Nancy Cowles, executive director of Kids in Danger, a nonprofit group dedicated to making children’s products safer.
Rachel Weintraub, director of product safety at the Consumer Federation of America, said the new crib rules were a major victory for consumers. “Cribs are the one place that are designed so you can leave your baby unattended,” she said. “That’s a huge amount of trust. Ultimately now consumers can have confidence in the safety of their crib, which is really important.”
Whatever their complaints were in the past, crib manufacturers and retailers may now stand to sell more cribs, as parents replace older models with new ones. It will now be illegal to sell used cribs, too, at least until the cribs that meet the new regulations have been in the market for several years. (Used cribs, however, are still available on Craigslist and eBay).
Delta Children’s Products sells about a half million cribs each year. Shamie said his company had seven testing plants around the world trying out new designs and, in the case of the New Jersey location, making sure products imported from Asia meet Delta’s standards, which he says exceeded the United States government regulations. Delta’s products are also certified by independent laboratories, he said.
At the testing lab here, one machine simulates a child jumping up and down in a crib by dropping a 45-pound weight on the mattress, first in the center and then in each of the corners, six hundred times for each spot. Another machine pulls back and forth on a crib railing, seven thousand times each way. Even the slats are tested, by dangling an eighty-pound weight from each one to make sure it does not come loose or snap. “We abuse the cribs,” Shamie said.

Rico says it's the crib manufacturers they should be abusing; dropping a eighty-pound weight on their extremities would do... (But why they weren't forced, let alone volunteering, to take back any late sales of now-illegal cribs, Rico says he, as usual, fails to understand.)