SHADY BUSINESS?
Amazon injury suit over eclipse glasses
Amazon blindsides competitors all the time. Now, it’s getting accused of blurring its customers’ vision.
The online behemoth has been slapped with a lawsuit from a couple in South Carolina who say they’re suffering from blurred vision, headaches and other symptoms after watching the solar eclipse last week through a faulty pair of eclipse glasses they bought on Amazon.
The suit, which is seeking class-action status, alleges the glasses were “extremely dangerous and/or defective” and Amazon did “too little too late” to alert customers.
During the run-up to the event on Aug. 21, numerous reports surfaced that fake eclipse glasses were hitting the US market. The reports advised shoppers on how to spot them.
Several days before the eclipse, Amazon itself set off a media fracas when it emailed shoppers who had purchased defective eclipse glasses, recommending that they not use them. Amazon also refunded their accounts, according to reports.
But the South Carolina couple, Thomas Corey Payne and Kayla Harris, claim they never received an e-mail. Shortly after watching the eclipse, they began to see “blind spots in their line of vision, increased sensitivity and distorted vision,” the suit states.
“There are a number of possibilities here, and it’s only through discovery that we’ll find out what happened,” the couple’s lawyer, Steven Teppler of Abbott Law Group, told The Post.
“Either the glasses were purchased by Amazon and sold by Amazon or fulfilled by Amazon by a third-party seller. We are trying to determine that right now,” Teppler said.
Amazon was not transparent in its warning, failing to identify the vendor involved or make a more public statement about the defective glasses, the complaint says.
Some of the defective glasses were sold on Amazon in packages of as many as 20, meaning that the glasses could wind up in the hands of people who did not buy them directly from Amazon, the suit noted.
“If you purchased this item for someone else, please pass along this information to the recipient,” Amazon advised in its email.
“The wording from Amazon’s e-mail doesn’t make it clear whether it was a vendor or Amazon that sold the glasses. It might be both,” Tepper said. “We think there is at least some liability and in some cases absolute liability for Amazon.”
Tepper’s clients didn’t ap- pear to be alone: The phrase “my eyes hurt” peaked on Google shortly after the eclipse. By some estimates, nearly half of America viewed the eclipse, including President Trump, who defied warnings by looking directly at the eclipse without any protective eyewear.
Amazon bought about 10 million eclipse glasses manufactured by American Paper Optics, according to USA Today.
Amazon declined to comment, and American Paper Optics did not return a call for comment.