Readers of my book will be reminded that your yard sale is probably illegal.  As the weather here in the Midwest is heating up, I’m sure we’ll start seeing a few more illegal yard sales.  Actually, I see an illegal yard sale all the time.  There’s a guy who lives pretty close to me that sets up shop on most weekends in his yard. Of course, this is illegal since he is not allowed to have that many yard sales in a year.

Besides that, he is probably not checking the CPSC’s database of recalled items.  Unless he cross-checks everything on that database with the items he is selling, he is likely to be selling a recalled item, which is illegal to do.  In case you don’t think this is a big deal and that it is probably a remote possibility that he is selling a recalled item, I want to introduce you to some recently recalled items.

So far this month, 10 things have been recalled.  This is almost an item a day.  They are not necessarily seriously dangerous or faulty items, either.  Yesterday a play theater toy was recalled due to two reports of the toy falling over, only one of which resulted in minor injury (bruises).  If minor bruises are a reason for recall, we’d better recall my entire house as well as the great outdoors. I realize that this is probably done to avoid litigation, but we need to get a grip.  If basically safe items keep getting recalled, we’re likely to eventually encounter something similar to the wolf effect.

As a continuing segment on this blog, I plan to update you on recalls — not so that you can be paranoid and return all of your recalled items, but so that the regular person can become aware of how obsessed we are with safety and how absurd it is to think about crosschecking all of your items with the recall database.  I think I’ll do it at the end of every month.  This one example should hold you over until the end of March.