Gerber has issued a recall on the BG Parang due to blade failure causing it to snap at the handle. The recommend use of the machete stop immediately and that they be contacted for a free replacement.
Gerber Parang Recall
Gerber has issued a recall on the BG Parang due to blade failure causing it to snap at the handle. The recommend use of the machete stop immediately and that they be contacted for a free replacement.
24 / 119,000 = .00020 failure rate. Am I missing something here? How's that grounds for a recall?
Better safe than sorry, I guess, and "CYA" is all the rage. But still, if you're one of the 24 people with a failure, you were probably trying to chop through a concrete wall or something.
Last edited by kairo; 02-27-2013 at 11:52 PM.
Company did right and didn't want to see people get hurt. I just got my brand spanking new one in the mail.Originally Posted by kairo
I can certainly understand that, but we're talking about an infinitesimally small failure rate. Obviously, when the failures occur on a knife, it's worse than say, a toothbrush snapping in half, but I still wonder. You've gotta figure, of the 119,000 sold, how many were to careful, considerate outdoors folks, using them for their intended purpose? When you market something as an "apocalypse survival kit", how many kids, or ignorant people are going to buy these things and start smashing them against things that were never meant to be cut?
Gerber certainly doesn't want to people to get hurt using their products, but I can very easily imagine this conversation happening in a back room:
"Well, Larry, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson bought this for young Timmy there. He cut his finger trying to pry a cinder block from the top of that abandoned bridge."
"I say, Charles, you're right! That leaves us open to liability for marketing a product to an age group that should never have owned it in the first place. Quick! Call the lawyers, recall the product for plausible deniability!"
Maybe I'm a cynic, but I deal with this kind of stuff all day every day with warranties and liability.
Good move Gerber.
Many other companies would've called that failure rate "acceptable."
Clearly there are some people at Gerber who care about their customers. Ethics in business is unfortunately not common enough these days.
All I'm saying is that rate of failure is far, far, far lower than the industry acceptable rates for surgical tools used during heart surgery...
I'm going to stick with cost of recall being far less than potential losses of one successful lawsuit. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
I happen to like Gerber a lot and I think they make many fine products. Whole reason I brought this up was because when I opened the thread, I expected to see something in the nature of a 5% failure rate or more.
Interesting to note as well, one of the product #'s was an item available only at Walmart. Reduced quality steel used to meet price point requirements? I did some further research on some of the failures. There seems to be a few that have suffered failures under normal use in the same area. But that could easily be attributed to the chinese factories where they're made. These are mass produced import blades after all, not space ships.
For what it's worth, you're 50 times more likely to have died in a car accident than you were to receive a defective Gerber Parang.
The odds are equally the same that you will die by electrocution as that you will have randomly purchased a defective Gerber Parang.
( http://www.livescience.com/3780-odds-dying.html stats used for reference)
Factory of manufacture is "Best Gifts Enterprises (Yangjiang) Ltd.
They identify 21% of their business as manufacture of "knife" products.
"Quality & Efficiency First" and "Being Always Faithful to Our Customers" are our principles while we do our business. We have a professional Design & Research team, who works on new ideas for both products and packaging, to meet the needs of customers all over the world.
Further discussion of the topic:
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/sh...-Parang-RECALL
Who knows, maybe it's just a poor design after all.
Man I was bored tonight lol
Last edited by kairo; 02-28-2013 at 01:44 AM.
There may have been a higher failure rate if people actually used it rather than buy some BG gear because it was cool to get it. I actually wouldn't have gotten one myself. A teen down the street was more interested in flashy cheap renaissance fair garbage than his functional gear and wanted to trade because it looked cooler to hang a broadsword on a wall instead of the real stuff.
Likely there would never be mass numbers of failures and with these low numbers Gerber could have just made a press release and said "Look we sold THOUSANDS and 12 failed. We stand by our product." They didn't though. Now if they did it for legal fears or just to be a stand up company, I will never know. I see exactly what you are saying though and I agree. These are staggeringly low failure numbers. I'll bet you that Iz Turley wouldn't put up with it though from his products.
No doubt the other thing Gerber have taken into account prior to instigating the recall is the cost of negative publicity to the company.
24 failures = 24 unsatisfied customers.
Given that the common equation of 1 unsatisfied customer = 10 disatisfied poptential customers, that's a potential 240 unsatisfied customers.
In this day of elec' media that's one hellova lot of negative publicity for Gerber products.
That could potentially cost them an absolute heap of dollars is lost sales.
That type of negative publicty far outweighs the cost of the very minor number of recalls.
Good call Gerber in minimising the nagative impact upon their products by instigating the recall.
Good business decision IMO.
i checked their web site but there is no mention of the recall,
. I remember the had some isssues a while back so im curious, thx for the heads up either way.
This recall began a long time ago - early last year or something like that. They only keep their website up-to-date with the most recent recalls...I guess they have a lot of them.
"I'm just a goat, who's halfway through eating itself..."
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