Let’s do a little roleplaying. Pretend you’re a kid. Say, 5 or 6. And you’ve been playing, and you’re thirsty, and mommy has just come back from shopping, so you ask mommy if you can have some grape juice, and she says yes.
So you go to the bag of groceries and find this bottle of Fabuloso. Looks like grape juice. Different brand than Welch’s, but mommy always buys different things depending on what’s on sale that week. You’re pretty sure you’ve heard the word on the label. You think it means really cool.
So you twist open the top… it’s hard, like some caps are, but you get it. And you pour some into your favorite sippy cup. And you only spill a little on the counter and a little more on the floor. And then you drink it… and it burns going down, and you cough, and your tummy feels like it’s going to explode… and then you pass out, vomit, and choke to death on your own vomit, all before mommy finishes unloading the car.
Well, that was fun. Luckily, it was just roleplaying. No 5 year old would ever drink cleaning fluid, right? Especially not when it looks like this…
Pretty bottles all in a row. Delicioso? No, Fabuloso!
Oops. Yes, my friends, that is a picture I took today of a supermarket shelf full of Fabuloso in all its glory. What beautiful packaging! What clever branding! What a great idea! Let’s make our multi-purpose cleaner look like a sports drink or juice and smell like one too. Cleaning is yucky, but everybody likes Gatorade.
What the heck were they thinking? And by the way, if you don’t think anybody would actually mistake Fabuloso for a sports drink or juice, check out this article in The Roanoke Times from 2006 that cites research by a physicians group that documented 94 cases of accidental ingestion in the first 6 months of that year in Texas alone. According to the article, many of the cases were children under 6 years old.
Perhaps that’s the most amazing thing to me: Fabuloso, which is made in Mexico, has been on the market in the US looking pretty much just like this since 1997, and according to Colgate, meets the standards of the U.S Consumer Product Safety Commission. (To be fair, they added a child-safety cap in September of 2006. And everyone knows how foolproof those are.)
Somebody at Colgate Palmolive made the choice to color bottles of Fabuloso like sodas or juice drinks. Somebody made the choice to package them in plastic bottles that look just like a sports drink. Somebody made the choice to make them smell fruity. And somebody made the choice to name them Fabuloso, which sounds absolutely… delicious.
So can someone please explain to me why didn’t someone else with half a brain and an ounce of common sense try and stop them?
OMG! I guess we can expect a slew of class action lawsuits for wrongful death against Colgate Palmolive. I know a few lawyers who would jump on these cases. (I might share this post with them for that matter…)
Colgate Palmolive should get rid of the team who worked on this product. You would think in this day and age people would have stopped putting profits above safety.
Just make sure that those lawyer friends of yours include the U.S Consumer Product Safety Commission as co-defendants. Isn’t it their job to catch this stuff? A friend of mine who lives in Mexico, Lisa, commented about this post on Facebook that she thought it was the cheapest packaging they could come up with, and I wouldn’t be surprised if cost really was running the show here. I’ve seen some pictures of other, I think earlier packaging, that looked exactly like the smaller sports or water bottles. Taller and thinner. Thanks for the comment, Josef.
Good job, Jeff, bringing this to peoples’ attention. The possibilities for tragedy are mind-numbing.
Especially if you’ve been drinking Fabuloso. (The mind numbing, that is.) Thanks for the comment, AF.
I am sorry but i use this to clean my house and my 4 yr old knows it is cleaning product not juice…..because i educate my children …..and what the hell would a 5 or 6 yr old child have a sippy cup for! If you child is 5 or 6 and can fix his/her own sippy cup … they are to damn big to have a sippy cup!…. Take the time to educate ur kids dont blame a product for causing problems in YOUR home.
Charol, I agree that it is a parent’s job to educate their children. But as a parent, you also know that you can’t predict every misguided choice a young child may make. And you can’t control what they see in other people’s homes. And regardless of that, I can expect and demand that a cleaning product not be misleading. I can protest by not buying it, or lodging a complaint, or even blogging about it. As for the 5 or 6 year old using a sippy cup, that’s my invention, and comes from my not remembering at what age my daughter stopped using a sippy cup. But regardless of what age she stopped, or your children stopped, I have since noticed older children using them. In a world where some people still breastfeed their children at 6, or some parents still keep their older children in strollers for convenience long past the age where they can walk, can we at least agree that there is some variance in child development?
So what is being done? This is serious and needs to be on the recall list for repackaging. Does anyone know how to go about this?
Judy, the U.S Consumer Product Safety Commission has cleared the product, so on that level, nothing is being done. I guess you could always contact Consumer Reports or a watchdog group if you wanted to actually help get something done, as opposed to just blog about it like lazy old me.
This does go right back to home education and responsible parenting. I worked for ten years in a major supermarket chain. I have stocked the soft drink, juice and cleaning aisles, and not once did I find a bottle of cleaning fluid of any kind in any of the juice or soft drinks aisle.
My concern isn’t about parents buying the product in the supermarket, Jacurrent. It’s about what little kids do at home, when their parents aren’t looking.
I wouldlike to educate you that some older children are still in strollers because they cannot walk. My Grandson has CP and falls more than he stands, for this reason he is sometimes piggybacking on his sisters stroller. In addittion, Wheelchairs for younger children look very much like strollers.
Thanks for pointing that out, Tammy. When I said that there is some variance in child development, that’s one of the points I meant, but clearly, my choice of the word “convenience” is inappropriate in the case of true need, as you describe.
[...] I was always fascinated by stickers as a kid, and we got some Mr. Yuk stickers one year in grade school. I put those bad boys all over everything, including my sisters. According to “Pudding Pops”, Mr, Yuk is still going strong via the Pittsburgh Poison Center, though he is nowhere near as prevalent as he was back in the day. Here’s to you, Mr. Green! I raise my glass of Fabuloso in your honor…. [...]