Amazon have been fined a paltry £65,000 with £60,000 costs by Southwark Crown Court for sending prohibited items such as aerosols and lithium batteries by plane.
The case bought by the CAA carried the possibility of an unlimited fine. To put £65,000 into perspective, Amazon UK Services Ltd turned over £1bn with profits of £38m in 2015.
Amazon have basically waltzed away with a slap on the wrist and a fine which won’t even register as a blip on their accounting sheet. It falls into the level of you losing a couple of pennies down the back of your sofa.
Amazon argued that the 782 packages carriers complained about stating that the goods they contained shouldn’t be sent by air was an incredibly small number compared to the total 331,400,000 packages they sent in the same period – November 2013 to May 2015.
To put that into perspective it could only take one battery exploding to bring down a plane and that would be much worse publicity for Amazon than a trial and a £65,000 fine. They need to do better even if their error rate is just 0.0002%.
Amazon issued a statement saying: “The safety of the public, our customers, employees and partners is an absolute priority. We ship millions of products every week and are confident in the sophisticated technologies and processes we have developed to detect potential shipping hazards. We are constantly working to further improve and will continue to work with the CAA in this area“.
3 Responses
Safety is what matters than any other things. Sellers who sell batteries and other things that could be exploded should be given cautions, instructions and rules for safer packaging and shipping.
£65,000… That’ll teach them a lesson
Given that every passenger, pilot and stewardess on the plane is carrying at least one lithium battery I don’t see this as a huge problem.
Every item with a battery I’ve ordered off Amazon for years has been clearly labeled with the hazard label, can’t remember a single order from eBay that was correctly labeled so maybe the CAA should be going after the people flouting the rules.