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Some Retailers Criticize Amazon's Recall of Eclipse Glasses (kgw.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Portland TV station KGW:
Amazon issued a widespread recall for solar eclipse glasses early Saturday morning, one week before the August 21 eclipse. That move stunned some sellers who say their glasses are verified safe.... "We recommend that you DO NOT use this product to view the sun or the eclipse," Amazon wrote... "Out of an abundance of caution, we have proactively reached out to customers and provided refunds for eclipse glasses that may not comply with industry standards." At least a dozen KGW viewers said they received recall notices from Amazon Saturday... KGW viewer Heather Andersen said she bought two separate sets of solar glasses and learned both were not verified. "I give up," she tweeted...
Manish Panjwani's Los Angeles-based astronomy product business, AgenaAstro, has sold three times its average monthly revenue in the past month. Ninety-five percent is related to the solar eclipse... Panjwani's eclipse glasses come from two NASA-approved sellers: Thousand Oaks Optical in Arizona and Baader Planetarium in Germany. He said he provided documentation to Amazon proving the products' authenticity weeks ago, with no response from Amazon. On Saturday morning, he woke up to 100 emails from customers after Amazon issued a recall for his products. "People have some of the best glasses in the world in their hands right now and they don't believe in that product," he said. "They're out there looking for something inferior." Panjwani said Amazon is temporarily retaining some of his profits because of the recall. He also has almost 5,000 glasses at an Amazon warehouse, which customers can no longer purchase. "That's just sitting there. I cannot sell it and I cannot get it back in time for the eclipse," he said.
Manish Panjwani's Los Angeles-based astronomy product business, AgenaAstro, has sold three times its average monthly revenue in the past month. Ninety-five percent is related to the solar eclipse... Panjwani's eclipse glasses come from two NASA-approved sellers: Thousand Oaks Optical in Arizona and Baader Planetarium in Germany. He said he provided documentation to Amazon proving the products' authenticity weeks ago, with no response from Amazon. On Saturday morning, he woke up to 100 emails from customers after Amazon issued a recall for his products. "People have some of the best glasses in the world in their hands right now and they don't believe in that product," he said. "They're out there looking for something inferior." Panjwani said Amazon is temporarily retaining some of his profits because of the recall. He also has almost 5,000 glasses at an Amazon warehouse, which customers can no longer purchase. "That's just sitting there. I cannot sell it and I cannot get it back in time for the eclipse," he said.
News At 11
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
Both Thousand Oaks Optical and Baader are really well-known in the astro community. They both have been making solar filters for a long time and I doubt they would jeopardize customers safety and their brand recognition like this.
I realize it's asking a lot but RTFA.
Wow, if you're that scared about losing your job you must have close to nothing of value to offer employers.
Yup - if you were selling good merchandise, then you should have warranted it as good, rather than putting up big disclaimers saying not to watch the eclipse with it.
We stop acting like children thinking a solar eclipse is a once in a life time event.
There's another one crossing the US in 2024 (south to north) by the way. And being in the path of totality is nothing special. Believe me I've been there, it's nothing to write home about.
The only reason to pay attention to this is if you're a scientist doing research. If you're not, you will be very disappointed.
The ten-pack Eclipse Glasses that sold for $25 in July is now $85 on Amazon.
can't get the day off, so this doesn't affect hard workers so I have trouble caring. My employer here in Seattle said we get no time off that entire week, so I'm not sympathetic to lazy people that don't want to work.
There's a difference between a "real" job, and a good job.
A good job means you can take vacation whenever you want to, because you work for an employer who understands work/life balance, and respects employee requests for time off.
I work hard to earn my time off, so I'm not sympathetic to that fucking pathetic "lazy" excuse of yours. The fact is your employer is a greedy bitch who's looking to maximize revenue at the expense of every employee. Enjoy that real job of yours. I'll be on vacation having trouble caring.
I'm upset about this mostly because of how close Amazon cut it. This could have been done a month ago (I've got a friend who bough some in early July and got one of these e-mails). Like some said above, that makes this look like profiteering now that prices for "Safe" ones are bumped up. Finding retailers that have them in stock, and can deliver before the eclipse is a problem at this point.
...As someone that has worked for twelve years without a single day off, I have no respect for their kind.
I have no respect or sympathy for robotic idiots who think that working twelve years without a single day off should impress the rest of the sane people on the planet.
Our kind is not lazy for wanting a day off. It's called being human. You should wake up and try it sometime. Might stop you from looking back on your life in utter disgust, since there is far more to life than working every fucking day.
I bought a pack of 4 eclipse glasses. The listing on Amazon claimed they were ISO certified. However, before they arrived, I had some doubt about the glasses because the manufacturer was not listed as a supplier of safe glasses. When I went to look at the listing again, it had been taken down (not just zero available, but the product was not found).
When they arrived, there was no ISO marking on the glasses. In fact, there was a marking "Do not use for Sun glasses".
So, they went back, then about a day later, I received the email from Amazon warning me about these glasses.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
That's actually terrible advice - during the eclipse, the sun does not appear to be as bright, so it will be more "comfortable" to look directly at it, but there's still more than enough UV light to permanently damage your eyes.
"Profiteering" is just another word for market economics. This is just supply and demand. The supply is limited, the demand is surging, so of course the price should go up to the market-clearing level. The alternative is rationing and shortages, which is idiotic.
I hope people don't listen to your advice. They may permanently damage their eyes. As a result, they may sue you. From https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/... :
The only time that the Sun can be viewed safely with the naked eye is during a total eclipse, when the Moon completely covers the disk of the Sun. It is never safe to look at a partial or annular eclipse, or the partial phases of a total solar eclipse, without the proper equipment and techniques. Even when 99% of the Sun's surface (the photosphere) is obscured during the partial phases of a solar eclipse, the remaining crescent Sun is still intense enough to cause a retinal burn, even though illumination levels are comparable to twilight [Chou, 1981, 1996; Marsh, 1982]. Failure to use proper observing methods may result in permanent eye damage or severe visual loss. This can have important adverse effects on career choices and earning potential, since it has been shown that most individuals who sustain eclipse-related eye injuries are children and young adults [Penner and McNair, 1966; Chou and Krailo, 1981].
No he is absolutely right - for the actual total eclipse. If you use solar filters for that you will not see anything.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Going 31 years without a real vacation sucks, but it means I know I'm valuable.
It doesn't mean you're valuable... it means you are a slave to your job and have little value of your own time. It mean's you're a fucking idiot. I can 110% guarantee you that you're employer doesn't value you as much as you think they do.
Yup. Been sitting by a river all day playing guitar after quitting work this summer. One of my best days in a long time.
Should be I think -8 or somewhere close (not common), I use a -4 with dichroic coating as well as an additional layer of an active welding filter. Even a scratch can be problematic. I would never trust a 1/1000" plastic filter for anything not replaceable even though the active filter may only be 1/10^100th thick on either..
Surge pricing.
Anyway, if you drink enough vodka and grapefruit juice, you can view the eclipse with the naked eye. I read it in a men's health magazine. Wait, maybe the article said you can view the eclipse naked.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem Amazon faces is true of all safety equipment. If some fly-by-night or foreign vendor puts sunglasses on the store as being fit for solar eclipse viewing Amazon is on hook for injuries. The same will be true of any other safety equipment that fails. As the only deep pocket left in sight, Amazon will bear the hole burden. It is the result of making sure the injured person is compensated if someone is more responsible than the injured person. Our system encourages knee-jerk decisions just like this to prevent injuries.
It's the American way. Once you move away from caveat emptor, it is the only logical stopping place.
I wonder when they are issuing a general recall on most welding goggles/masks?
After all, you can get more damage, more quickly, if those are not up to standards.
Well? Amazon?
No, didnt think so..
Oh well, I am sure a pack of lawyers will have a whole lot of rather profitable fun from this.
^Dictated to a voice-to-text device.
According to Meade, my EclipseView glasses meet all relevant standards. Amazon needs to calm down. Who elected them official Eclipse Safety Gods?
I take exception to the statement "The only time that the Sun can be viewed safely with the naked eye is during a total eclipse, when the Moon completely covers the disk of the Sun."
When the Moon completely covers the disk of the Sun, you can't view the Sun at all. So, safe, OK, but misleading.
You'll see the corona. It's the best thing to look at.
Sorry, but most good employers know when people take time off and plan around it. You may be surprised, but not too many people are going to see the eclipse.
You put in your request for time off in advance, maybe a few months to a few weeks, and they'll likely approve it because it can be slotted into the work. The more time you give, the easier they will at approving your request. Do it last minute and results can be iffy, but even so most employers will provide for short term leave, if possible.
For the eclipse, most people probably don't care. Or since it happens on a work day, they might take 10 minutes from their day to go outside and take a look, then head back in later. Given smokers take smoke breaks, that's all it's really going to amount to - a bunch of people taking a smoke break. Most people will just see a partial eclipse. Those who are going to travel to see the full eclipse have put in their vacation requests weeks ahead of schedule, because they needed to book hotels and other things.
And while people are expecting chaos near the total eclipse path, it's not as bad as you think - maybe a million people total over the entire band, out of a population of over 300 million is not going to seriously affect anything.
Ans UPS and USPS and others not doing deliveries? I'm sure they have more than a few people taking the day off. They either have replacement workers ready to cover (easy to do when you plan ahead), or plan for reduced throughput that day, because honestly, most packages will not be missed if they were delivered on a Tuesday instead of Monday. And if they were, then perhaps you should've paid for (guaranteed) express delivery instead of economy.
The world doesn't stop turning when people take vacations. Good employers plan for it - they know Thanksgiving is going to be an odd week, so they plan for reduced workforce around it - either delaying deadlines, hiring coverage workers, or just planning for reduced productivity. Same goes around the winter break. And summer too - employers plan for a good chunk of people to simply take time off during the summer. Hell, in China, Chinese New Year means the entire country is off a couple of weeks. If Foxconn and others can plan on their entire workforce going on holidays for two whole weeks, planning on a handful of employees missing every day isn't difficult.
Life happens. People get sick. Often the person you need that information from either goes on holiday, gets ill, or is otherwise indisposed when you need them most. And people live.
Employers that don't allow their staff to take vacations because it impacts their deliverables are not running an efficient ship. They're running a potential disaster - if missing one employee impacts the business to the extent that the business can falter, then it is a business that will falter. Basically, your boss is squeezing everyone, probably to make a few extra bucks. Well, they can make more money by getting rid of stuff like UPSes and RAID in the server room too - it's the same thing whether it's hardware, software, or wetware. You plan for any of those to go down, at the worst possible moment, too.
And I'm going to watch a shaky vertical smartphone video recording of the eclipse being played back on youtube.
Better safe than sorry.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
No. This is what we get when a large marketplace is too easily filled with knock-off goods by less than reputable sellers. As a buyer, I think Amazon should be as aggressive as possible in preventing counterfeits, especially when the counterfeits are basically hijacking the legitimate listings making it much more difficult to sort out which prices are for what. Over at eBay, where each item/seller is its own listing, this isn't a problem. I can confidently buy fakes at a vastly discounted price knowing that is what I'm doing. My last experience trying to sell on Amazon, I was trying to resell some DVDs I'd actually bought through Amazon, yet was denied the listing because of the risk of counterfeits. The aggravating part of that wasn't so much that Amazon was being safe, but that my legit goods wouldn't stand a chance against the fakes on eBay.
I do not have a signature
If you're one of those pussies who's afraid of UV light, you're probably not going to be going outside to look at it anyway.
Have you never enjoyed a day at the beach? An afternoon picnic? Are you one of those douches who wears dark sunglasses all the time?
Put them on.
Look at the sun
Do your eyes hurt, Is it too bright, or leaving spots?
--Yes- return These are garbage
--No- Pass these have been verified.
You're not a garden slug. You can tell if something is too bright to look at. If not better move into a cave.
You don't need eye protection any more than you do on a normal day. In fact you need less. Much less.
Take the amount of time you spend staring at the sun on a normal day and compare it to the amount of time you plan to spend staring at the eclipse factored by the average amount of eclipse coverage over that time. A few minutes of staring at an eclipse is nothing compared to about a century of existing on this planet. Unless you're a cave dweller. And like I said, if you're worried about it, use your built in sunglasses by squinting. If you're a pussy, use regular ol' sunglasses that block UV.
I;m not in the path of totality, and I plan to take a break during whatever the peak time is, step outside and look for a bit, say "neat", and then go back to work.
I'll let you know how my retinas fare. If you're lucky, I'll be blind and unable to shitpost on Slashdot.
The trick is for all the legit retailers to file a class action against Amazon in California. It is Amazon's own fault for letting in a massive number of no name knockoff vendors from China (or same with a single front person in the US forwarding their cheap knockoff junk with zero vetting).
Amazon should eat every penny of the losses because they are the ones that polluted their marketplace, not the legit vendors. I hate how Amazon has become a third world flea market in a lot of ways. I would much rather pay higher prices for legit, high quality products.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Wow, flimsy paper and solar film going for $10+ each now...not a week ago it was a buck a piece for the cheapy (and probably non-certified) glasses.
I got 3 pairs of nice plastic ones for maybe 10 bucks...guaranteed certified except I probably have a recall notice too. FML.
B&H included a 5-pack for free when I bought a lens recently...I almost refused them (returns are complicated by 'free' items) but now it sounds like I could sell them for $20 each!
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
You don't have these little things called EYES focusing the UV light.
Oh, and you might not realize but excessive UV does damage your skin. Luckily for you, skin heals quickly and easily except in extreme cases.
Your retina? Does. Not. Heal. Any damage is permanent and, while your eye will adapt and 'fill in' blank spaces of damaged retina you will forever have a demonstrable blind spot. Go google laser eye injuries for some funtastic examples of how well that goes over.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
You won't be blinded by glimpsing at the sun briefly...even if you do it a bunch of times over the years. Everyone knows that.
Staring at it for a few minutes straight? Very different story.
Kind of like the 1000's of hours of sun we all get but when we spend 6 hours straight at the beach we turn into a lobster. Skin heals. Retinas do not.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
If you (like me) bought glasses and then got a warning email from Amazon, the American Astronomical Society has a guide to checking your glasses
The glasses are so dark that for a moment, I thought I'd gotten scammed into buying opaque glasses. The sun shows up as a moderately bright disk. It's very weird to look at the sun.
You don't need eye protection any more than you do on a normal day. In fact you need less. Much less.
Take the amount of time you spend staring at the sun on a normal day and compare it to the amount of time you plan to spend staring at the eclipse factored by the average amount of eclipse coverage over that time. A few minutes of staring at an eclipse is nothing compared to about a century of existing on this planet. Unless you're a cave dweller. And like I said, if you're worried about it, use your built in sunglasses by squinting. If you're a pussy, use regular ol' sunglasses that block UV.
I know exactly what you mean! People keep telling me that I shouldn't put my hand in the gas flame of my stove, because I will get burned. But I say that the flame in my gas furnace is way bigger, and heats my whole freaking house! And yet apparently it is safe to use 5 months out of the year, even when I am asleep. But put a dinky little flame on the stove, and all of a sudden people are like "OH NOES, DON'T TOUCH THE FLAMES!". Pussies.
I've checked about 20+ retailers, and they're all sold out. Anyone have a source on where a pair of glasses can still be ordered in time for the eclipse?
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Yes, they didn't sell the certified products. Hoping to make a fast buck off the eclipse. Their products could in fact be safe, however because they are not certified, we don't know. And the seller doesn't really know either, but they got them and tried to sell them anyways. Too bad, so sad. But that is what you get trying to sell non-certified safety products. A warehouse of unsellable products. Next time they will learn to be more careful when trying to sell such things.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The interesting thing about cheap knockoffs, is the fact that they are cheap.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Are they going to build factories to speed up production to meet demand, for a product that no one will want to use in over a week?
Supply is quite limited compared to the current demand, then after the eclipse there will be a surplus. Bubble economics at work.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It is bigger then on-line, it is putting all your product into any one retailer in general is risky. The product that you sell that accounts for 100% of your profit is 1% of the profit of the retailer. Their interest in selling your product is limited to if they can make money from yours, or if your spot can make more money then something else.
If your product is a liability then chances are you going to loose that retailer.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That's why I got my time off request in in February. We're not going to close the company down, and I wanted to get it in early and beat the competition. There are places that can shut down.
If you can't get a vacation, find a real job. If your company will go broke if you take a week off, it's doomed anyway, because you're probably going to be out sick that long some time or another.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
An annular eclipse is cool, or a partial, but a total eclipse is fantastic.
Most people can walk off the job for five minutes without disrupting things. There are exceptions.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If you diversify, you can still wind up selling 90% of your stuff through Amazon, because a lot of people buy stuff through Amazon. If Amazon screws you over, you're probably screwed no matter what you did.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In 1979, I put down my welding glass to see totality and just stared at it. The corona was so beautiful. Then I missed Bailey's beads because they stabbed my eyes with sunlight and I automatically flinched and closed my eyes. Looking at anything other than a total eclipse during totality is a really bad idea, but most of us will react appropriately.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes