The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission recall list is a wormhole, comprised of children’s toys that are possibly just a bunch of choking hazards taped together; axes that are just itching to cause serious injury; and a wooden table with a grill insert, which should have been flagged in the design stage. It gives you a fascinating glimpse at other people’s terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad days from interacting with faulty products.
Imagine, for instance, that you decided to eat at a Cracker Barrel. (This is not yet the part where you’re having a bad day, but surely you could have been having a better day.) It’s not the worst of the roadside options, and honestly, the biscuits are little piles of lard heaven whose calories don’t count if you eat them more than 100 miles from either your home or your destination. Plus there’s that table game with the colorful pins in the wooden triangle.
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After paying $8.99 for enough food to hibernate on, something in the Southern Baptist cosplay giftshop catches your eye. It’s the perfect rustic-slash-tropical tchotchke you’ve been looking for: a decorative driftwood pineapple. You pick it up, hand over 40 whole American dollars, take it home with you, and just when you’re going to set it out the mantle, one of the galvanized metal leaves slices your hand, sending you to the ER for stitches. Or maybe, it made it to the mantle, you admired it for a few days, and then your dumb friends/kids/friend’s kids decided it was shaped enough like a football to start throwing around, and one of the galvanized metal leaves sliced one of their dumb hands, sending them to the ER for stitches.
Either way, according to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, that’s on Cracker Barrel. As of today, Cracker Barrel is recalling the roughly 1,500 decorative driftwood pineapples with galvanized metal leaves they sold between June and August of this year because they, “received two reports of consumers cutting their fingers on the metal leaves on the pineapples, resulting in one injury that required stitches.”
Actual pineapple leaves are pretty sharp and probably have a similar injury rate—don’t even get us started on Talenti gelato, avocados, or pizza—but you should probably “immediately stop using the recalled pineapples and return them to any Cracker Barrel Old Country Store® for a full refund” anyway, because it honestly just looks like someone tried to repurpose leftover pinecones for the summer by sticking a bunch of spikes in them.
And remember: decorate with woodland-inspired whimsy responsibly.
