Consumer Protection
PROTECTING CONSUMER SAFETY—Toys should not be toxic or dangerous for children to play with. Our food should not make us sick. The terms for banking and credit accounts should be clear and easy to understand.
LOOKING OUT FOR the Public
PennPIRG Education Fund’s consumer program works to alert the public to hidden dangers and scams and to ban anti-consumer practices and unsafe products.
TROUBLE IN TOYLAND
For 30 years, PennPIRG Education Fund’s "Trouble In Toyland" report has surveyed store shelves and identified choking hazards, noise hazards and other dangers. Our report has led to at least 150 recalls and other regulatory actions over the years.
Get our tips for avoiding dangerous toys.
BIGGER BANKS, BIGGER FEES
In April, PennPIRG Education Fund released a report in which we surveyed more than 350 bank branches and revealed that fewer than half of branches obeyed their legal duty to fully disclose fees to prospective customers, while one in four provided no fee information at all. We also found that despite widespread stories about the “death” of free checking, free and low-cost checking choices are still widely available, if consumers shop around.
Find out how to beat high bank fees.
SEE ALL CONSUMER RESOURCES
Issue updates
Contaminated food, from Tyson's chicken strips containing chunks of metal to E. coli-laden romaine lettuce, posed a serious danger to Americans’ health in 2019. PennPIRG Education Fund How Safe Is Our Food? report found recalls for produce and processed food have fallen 34 percent since 2016, but meat and poultry recalls are up 65 percent since 2013.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announced today that discount stores T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods sold 19 different recalled products to consumers between 2014 and 2019. In the case of five products, the stores’ parent company TJX initiated the recall. The products included the Rock ‘N Play and Kids II inclined infant sleepers, which are responsible for a number of fatalities, rattles that can break and pose a choking hazard, and electronics that overheat or explode.
Here in Pennsylvania, we want to fix our stuff.
Something breaks, or doesn’t work right. You could throw it away, but you don’t want to be wasteful so you try to figure out how to get it fixed.
According to a review of data from iFixit, a self-described “repair guide for everything, written by everyone,” more than 2 million unique users from Pennsylvania went onto their website, www.ifixit.com, to look up how to repair something in 2018.
Looking more closely into that data from iFixit, the top ten device types that Pennsylvania attempted to fix were cell phones, laptops, automobiles, gaming consoles, tablets, vacuums, desktop computers, watches, instruments, and wireless speakers. Cell phone repair guides were by far the most popular, receiving 28 percent of all the page views.
Here in Pennsylvania, we want to fix our stuff. Something breaks, or doesn’t work right. You could throw it away, but you don’t want to be wasteful so you try to figure out how to get it fixed. According to a review of data from iFixit, a self-described “repair guide for everything, written by everyone,” more than 2 million unique users from Pennsylvania went onto their website, www.ifixit.com, to look up how to repair something in 2018. Looking more closely into that data from iFixit, the top ten device types that Pennsylvania attempted to fix were cell phones, laptops, automobiles, gaming consoles, tablets, vacuums, desktop computers, watches, instruments, and wireless speakers. Cell phone repair guides were by far the most popular, receiving 28 percent of Here in Pennsylvania, we want to fix our stuff.
Something breaks, or doesn’t work right. You could throw it away, but you don’t want to be
wasteful so you try to figure out how to get it fixed.
According to a review of data from iFixit, a self-described
“repair guide for everything, written by everyone,” more than
2 million unique users from Pennsylvania went onto their
website, www.ifixit.com, to look up how to repair something
in 2018.
Looking more closely into that data from iFixit, the top ten device types that Pennsylvania attempted
to fix were cell phones, laptops, automobiles, gaming consoles, tablets, vacuums, desktop
computers, watches, instruments, and wireless speakers. Cell phone repair guides were by far the
most popular, receiving 28 percent of
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