Toys 'R' Us and Babies 'R' Us have settled a class action lawsuit for alleged price-fixing by agreeing to reimburse consumers for a portion of their purchases on certain baby gear. Here's a list of what you might have bought at an allegedly illegally marked-up price, what purchase dates are eligible for a partial refund, what percentage of the purchase price is being offered as reimbursement, and how much that might be (based on today's retail prices):



The total settlement purse is over $35 million. You have until August 1, 2011 to file a claim.

To file a claim, dig up whatever paperwork you have to support the purchase -- credit card statements, receipts if you have them, cancelled checks, or whatever else can demonstrate that you made the purchase and, if possible, how much you actually paid. Our philosophy on these situations is that even if you aren't sure if your paperwork is enough, make a copy of it, fill out the form, and send it in. Head to the settlement notice to find out how.

(h/t Baby Cheapskate)

We've been playing with Britax's new compact, lightweight stroller, the Blink, for a few months now, and are ready to share our impressions with you. We're also ready to experiment with more video reviewing, so today's post is a combination of the two. I'll share a few highlights about the Blink in text form, drop in our video demo review, and follow up with a few things you'll see us tweak as we get further into this video reviewing thing.

What Britax does for $150 is impressive. The Blink's basic bone structure is nearly identical to the MacLaren Triumph, but at about $40 less MSRP and with bigger wheels. The canopy is generously sized, it has a pocket I didn't mention in the demo below, and it has a five-point harness. Overall, it's the most lightweight and maneuverable feel you'll get out a stroller built with what also feels like very durable construction. We love how smooth and functional the seat recline is - that plus the five-point harness are two factors that make this stroller truly useful for younger kids - yet this stroller's weight limit tops out at 55 pounds. Z is very tall for her five years, and fits very comfortably in this stroller. (We took it with us to the ABC Kids' Expo in Las Vegas in September. It travels great, too.) The Blink's wheels also have some sort of internal suspension system; we didn't notice this specifically but it does have a smooth ride. Our only real complaint about the stroller is mentioned in the video.


My tripod was an eight-foot ladder, so in choosing between step 4 and 5 I know I didn't necessarily get the best angle on the action. More broadly, we'll try to incorporate still photo details and/or multiple camera angles into these reviews so we can cover things in better technical detail. We'll also do some video reviews of things that don't really need any technical detail, and we'll use multiple camera angles or takes to keep them fresh. We probably won't do much scripting, either, so we'll focus our video reviewing on the products we've had the most experience with and can easily speak about off the cuff. To that end, our videos will probably always be supplemented by some additional information in a blog post, although I'm not sure how best to point people to that post if they're watching the video off-site (on YouTube, embedded in someone else's blog, etc.). Any thoughts on this would be welcome!

Hopefully this model for video reviews can prepare us for even more interesting and personalized video segments soon. And of course, we'll still be doing a lot of text-and-photo reviewing in the format you're used to seeing on ZRecs.

The Britax Blink sells for $150 on Amazon.com and elsewhere. We recommend it for those who want a compact stroller that has a sturdy and open feel, a great child size and age range, and good portability at a very reasonable price point. (You can also outsmart that one design flaw with a pen shoved between one of the pairs of rear wheels.)

The Britax Blink stroller in this review was sent to us by the manufacturer. We will be donating it to charity.

We have never, ever seen a suction bowl that works. Oh, there are plenty out there. Munchkin, Boon, that weird one that comes with phone-cord utensils - it's enough to make parents of dish-flipping toddlers contemplate the obvious alternative. Ultimately, the best solutions we've seen have been those that give up on suction altogether in favor of a spill-resistant lip around the bottom edge of a dish - Baby Bjorn and Boon each have one of these.

Vital Baby, a UK company entering the U.S. market sometime soon, hasn't given up. And they have a pretty interesting new strategy to make suction bowls actually work.


The suction cup of this BPA-free, phthalate-free bowl is very strong, but we won't be completely convinced until we have a chance to do our own use testing. Watch for it soon on Z Recommends. We're still waiting for our sample.

The current status of bisphenol-A, which is teetering somewhere between near-unilateral corporate disavowal and a patchwork of outright bans, is what it is because we - parents, consumers, and part-time, practical activists - made it that way. That means we also have the power to decide what Health Canada's discovery of trace levels of BPA in non-polycarbonate bottles means to us. And the choice we make as consumers can have a big impact on whether there is a bright future ahead for "BPA-free."

We disagree with the argument that you should not be worried because the study is flawed. Yes, the study needs to be replicated. But our primary concerns - the apparent lack of a control and the lack of disclosure of detailed information - have both been cleared up. We now have all the data, an explanation of how they established a control group (in glass!), and the bottom line is, HC probably correctly identified that there are trace quantities of BPA in "BPA-free" products.

The question is, what does this mean?

In the week following the release of this report data we have seen some bloggers working to publicize it in as sensational a manner as possible. Worse, we have seen hardworking brands dedicated to providing the safest products possible declared to be liars who acted in bad faith by presenting BPA-containing products to consumers as BPA-free.

We don't see it that way, for a couple of reasons.

First, these levels are really, really, really small. The highest levels of BPA detected in non-polycarbonate plastics was under 2% of that found in polycarbonate, and that was found in pure water. In a 10% ethanol solution, which is more comparable to breast milk or formula, there was no detectable amount.

Second, non-polycarbonate bottles aren't the only place you wouldn't expect to find BPA, but will. Remember, this BPA probably came from dust present in the manufacturing facilities where the bottles were made. Trace amounts of BPA have been detected in drinking water (the Health Canada study corrected for it), and in human breast milk, not to mention infant formula (in higher quantities still). If you use recycled toilet paper, there is probably BPA in it, because there is BPA in the heat-sensitive paper used in credit card receipts, which is a significantly recycled paper product, and for all we know there could be BPA in dust in paper mills as well. It is the very ubiquity of harmful chemicals in our environment that make them, on the whole, so worthy of excommunication from the chemistry of our lives.

In other words, if a study that showed virtually every non-PC baby bottle on the market during lengthy exposure to fatty liquid simulants showing a complete non-detect for BPA has you worried, you're missing the forest for the trees.

We say all this from the perspective of people who have helped shepherd people through an intense period of consumer self-examination. After reporting for a while on BPA leaching from polycarbonate bottles, mainstream media interest and coverage of the issue picked up, and a couple of watershed announcements got everyone searching online for answers. At its peak we had parents emailing us daily telling us they could not sleep because they had poisoned their babies and asking how could they get the poison out. It got to the point where we spent more time reassuring people that their children were going to survive than we did recommending safer bottles and sippy cups. But when you're talking about sperm counts, anogenital distances, possible links to upticks in diabetes or other problems, the specter of an unknown relationship to long-term cancer risk, and effects on fish and wildlife, you are not talking about children being poisoned by their own parents, you are talking about a population and an environment that is being subjected to exposure to a chemical that should be swiftly retired from the scene.

For that reason, many activists, including Z Recommends, Non-Toxic Kids, Eco Child's Play, the Environmental Working Group, SafeMama, and many others, worked hard from the start to address this issue on all fronts: To encourage consumers to buy products that were not made with polycarbonate plastic or were free of BPA using widely-validated methods of detection; to pressure companies to educate themselves about chemicals in their products, to allow ZRecs to share that information with consumers, and to find alternatives to BPA-containing plastics, which were usually quite close at hand; and to tell Congress that we as consumers believed this substance should be legislatively removed from the market.

In that case, the mass parental freak-out had a net positive effect. Parents abandoned BPA-rich polycarbonate plastic in droves, migrated to new companies using safer plastics or to glass bottles, and their children are genuinely better off for it. And ultimately, companies decided it was not worth their time to battle for a plastic that parents didn't believe in anymore, and they gave it up.

But this time, it's different. If you, as a parent, choose to freak out about trace amounts of BPA found in bottles not made using it, at levels far below the sensitivity of any prior established testing method and far below the level banned by the country at the forefront of BPA regulation (Canada); if you choose to demonize companies that have tried to protect your children from BPA, and done a very good job of it; and if there are enough parents who join you in freaking out about it, you will make every company that went into BPA-free products and had the temerity to say as much wish they had never had anything to do with you. You will make them wish they had continued to ignore and defy and work around you until you got so disgusted with the so-called responsiveness of the free-market system to consumer choice that you fed your children out of borosilicate test tubes.

We have read a few breathless accounts of the demonic duplicity of companies like Medela, Born Free, and Adiri, who are now "not really" BPA-free, and to those with such misplaced hostility we say: What planet are you on? We'd suggest you - as a consumer, a parent, and an advocate for change - do the same. The same parents who led the charge for change in the marketplace (change that has come to us, by leaps and bounds, over the past year) have the power to say, We have realistic expectations and reasonable concerns.

And from the looks of it, that's where this situation seems headed. Parents are not (at the moment) freaking out about these trace readings - perhaps because they understand the data, or perhaps because Health Canada took such pains to explain that they weren't worried.

What BPA-free will ultimately mean

We believe the U.S. government, if and when it gets around to regulating estrogenic chemicals like BPA, will have to set levels of tolerance, not outright bans. Like lead, phthalates, and other chemicals we wish to regulate for the protection of human health, we must set a level of "free-ness" that will be a clear standard to which companies will be held. Otherwise, "free" will be a slippery term dependent on the capabilities of scientists to measure, rather than the ability of companies to perform up to established expectations.

Companies have a right to expect this kind of treatment, and companies that have taken the lead in providing BPA-free products should be prepared to be the leaders on this, too. Our job as consumers and activists is to let them know that we're ready to hear that conversation happen whenever it needs to happen, and we will continue to support the companies that have supported our needs and our concerns. If you agree, don't be shy about it. If others dogpile on companies whose commitment to providing safer products for your children has made a positive difference in your life, say so.

It will still be up to the scientists to determine what level of exposure to chemicals like BPA may cause harm. But we do not believe a zero tolerance approach is a practical response, and we also don't believe that "BPA-free" must mean zero tolerance now and to whatever decimal place technicians can arrive at, any more than "fat-free" means truly free of fat or "phthalate-free" means truly free of phthalates (in fact, it means it has less than 0.1%).

If additional testing confirms the trace levels of BPA found in these non-polycarbonate products, we will flag items in the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products to alert parents to that fact, but with the caveat that we don't think these levels should currently be seen as a concern. Unless and until established and realistic levels for what "BPA-free" means indicate that a given product doesn't meet the standard, we will not be changing our labeling of these products in the ZRecs Guide from "BPA-free" to mark them as containing BPA. The levels are too low, and the results too uncertain, for that to be either useful to consumers or fair to companies.

We have complained in the past about the what-were-they-thinking poor quality of Munchkin's Snack Trap rip-off, and readers have been sounding off recently in a certain comment thread. But we may have been wasting our breath.

Is it really possible that the company behind the World's Worst Sippy Cup could also have conceived of the world's worst toddler snack holder?

Well, yes. In fact, it's highly likely, wouldn't you say?

Behold:


As an added bonus, an Amazon customer observes that the strange protrusion opposite the opening makes a natural handle so toddlers they can carry the snack holder around, opening down, to spill a trail of snacks in their path.

The high level of consumer expertise and inquisitiveness is one of our favorite things about regular ZRecs readers, and we've been reading into the Amazon purchases you make through our sites for a while now as a partial guide to what baby gear, sippy cups, kids' toys and books, and BPA-free water bottles you're thinking about, investing in, and willing to take a chance on. We realized recently that if we are able to learn so much from how our readers vote with their dollars, you could too - and we could learn more by asking you what you thought of these items now that you've tried them out.

That's the idea behind You Bought It, a new feature on ZRecs where we'll browse through the statistics of Amazon purchases made through ZRecs sites and invite readers who picked up some interesting items to discuss them. We'll highlight most-purchased items, products with strengths or weaknesses that seem to make or break products for some parents, and unusual items we only discovered thanks to your purchases.

In case it even needs to be said, all of the data we have on shopping through our links is completely anonymous. We have no idea who might have purchased what, or even what was purchased in combination with other items. Amazon works very hard to protect your privacy - what they maintain for us is a spreadsheet of what was purchased through our links. The sales of products through our sites helps fund our consumer research, advocacy, and independent product reviewing here on Z Recommends (as well as funding the care and feeding of our other blogs and the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products) - without it, we honestly wouldn't be able to do what we do. So this is as good a time as any to say - although we try to say it often - "Thanks!"

For this first round, we'll cover the period from June 1 until yesterday - a period which, for the sake of context, covers 1,095 items shipped. Further installments of You Bought It will cover about a month at a time.

Sippy Cups, Straw Cups, and Adult Water Bottles

More than anything else in the past few months, readers picked up sippy cups, straw cups, and water bottles. Here are some hard numbers.

Spending of ZRecs readers and passers-by on sippy and straw cups tends to cluster around some brands that are probably a bit less widely available, giving them a boost over the biggest national brands. (At least, that's what we tell ourselves about the fact that so few of you snapped up the Contigo AutoSeal, or the Playtex Insulator Straw Cup, through our Amazon links.) But the way that spending is distributed is pretty interesting anyway, in light of the recommendations we've made in this summer's Sippy Cup Showdowns.

Here's the breakdown of the top seven sippy and straw cups we saw the most activity for in that period:

• Tilty: 28 two-packs, or 56 cups, at $2.50-$5 per cup


• Innate MeMe: 22 sippys at $17 per cup


• Thermos Foogo Sippy Cup: 10 sippys at $16-$17 per cup


• Thermos Foogo Straw Cup: 7 straw cups at $12-$18 per cup


• Thinkbaby: 14 sippys at $9 per cup


• Munchkin Mighty Grip Flip-Top Straw Cup: 12 (in singles or two-packs), at $4-$8 per cup


• KidBasix Safe Sippy: 8 sippys, at $13-$15 per cup


• Nalgene Grip-n-Gulp: 8 sippys, at $7-$11 per cup

All of these but the Foogo and Safe Sippy were Top Picks in our Infant to Toddler or Toddler to Pre-K Sippy and Straw Cup Showdowns, and each of those middle-tier picks were voted up for inclusion in the Top Picks in our end-of-round reader polls.

What we most want to know is: How do all you Tilty shoppers like your super-cool, super cheap new sippy cups? Any complaints or surprises? Or are you as thrilled about them as we are?

By the way, at least a few of you also liked the look of the Rubbermaid Litterless Juice Box, which we named the World's Worst Straw Cup - 5 of those sold, too, a reflection of the disagreement among readers over our assessment of it. This is what they mean when they say "any publicity is good publicity," and why companies are still willing to send us products to review even though we don't promise to say only nice things.

For adult water bottles, the score was Camelbak 28 (for the BPA-Free Better Bottles - gotta love that bite valve - and Performance Bottles, with prices ranging from $8-$14 apiece), Thinksport 25 (a double-walled, fantastically-insulating, tank of a stainless steel sport bottle, selling for $16-$18 apiece) and Nalgene 8 (for their Tritan OTG bottles and wide-mouth bottles, $10-$12 apiece). A few of you bought Nathan stainless steel straw bottles, which we've never written about.

A couple of you bought these "Insta-Sip" screw-on sippy adapters for bottled water bottles. We were scratching our heads when we arrived at the product's page on Amazon and saw that fully half of Amazon shoppers who viewed these purchased them at $15 for two little sippy lids instead of the item suggested below the product image, a $3 alternative by Gerber. Then we realized the reason was probably because the Insta-Sip is labeled on Amazon in the product details as containing no polycarbonate plastic (and thus, presumably, being BPA-free) while the Gerber product description was silent on the issue.

This is typical of Gerber's unilaterally asleep-at-the-wheel behavior when it comes to providing definitive, trustworthy information regarding the BPA status of their products. (In case you were wondering why the vast majority of the many Gerber sippy and straw cups on the market were absent from our Sippy and Straw Cup Showdowns, well, every time we call customer service they tell us something different, and no one else there will talk to us.) Memo to Gerber: The fact that a product priced at five times what you charge for a similar item is matching you on sales is proof that you are HEMORRHAGING MONEY by acting like no one has ever heard about BPA. Genie, bottle, out. Join us.

Other Stuff You Bought The Most

It shouldn't surprise any long-term readers of Z Recommends or users of the ZRecs Guide that our readers buy a lot of children's feeding items. Munchie Mugs, Boon Snack Balls, and BabyBjorn plate and spoon sets are all items we love that were frequently purchased. The Munchie Mug is the best toddler-accessible snack carrier we've ever used, the Snack Ball is the most fun and whimsical, and the BabyBjorn plate has a great design for making it easier for kids to self feed, thanks to its genuinely non-skid base and unique shape. We saw a handful of each of these items purchased in the last couple months.

If any of you BabyBjorn plate users haven't noticed yet, the white part of the bowl pops out of the base for cleaning. It took us a while to figure that out!

We also saw purchases of several Booginhead SippiGrips, which we had never seen before. The SippiGrip is a sippy cup tether (seen plenty of those) but for some reason these things sell. My question - for any of you who purchased these, or have used them - it promises that it has a "unique grip material," but does it work as advertised? Any chance it makes your child throw their cup more - and can they haul it back up themselves once they've done so? Inquiring minds want to know.

Several of you also picked up Munchkin snack catchers, which we've never reviewed but always planned to, because we really dislike them. (We did give it two stars in the ZRecs Guide, but a video of its failings would be much more illuminating.) So if you have one of these, tell us - do you like it? If you do, have you had it for long, washed it many times? We've found that the petals that are supposed to hold snacks in quickly lose a bit of their shape, and that it then leaks crumbs and even small snack items like nobody's business. How about you?

Several of you haven't forgotten about the Green Toys Tea Set, either, which is one of our favorite recycled plastic toys. If you have a cute photo of your child playing with yours, send it to us and we'll publish it (and link to your blog, if you have one). We'd love to hear what you and your child think of it, but we're pretty sure you love it too, right down to the packaging.

The Most Expensive Stuff You Bought

Three of you bought Avent Steam Sterilizers, which was an interesting outlier - no one bought any other bottle sterilizer by any other brand through ZRecs during that time. What's up with that? Is it because it's well-discounted, or was there some other motivating factor?

Ninety-four of you (!) bought 30-minute Flip digital video camcorders when they were on sale for $50-$60. Either that, or some of you bought more than one. Given the absurdly low sale price you paid for it, how do you like it?

Several of you bought Hamilton Beach food processors after we identified their BPA status; this food processor was the most popular, and is frequently on sale for around 25% off. We had never (and still have never) used Hamilton Beach products, so we'd really like to know: If you bought this, how has it performed?

ZRecs visitors also dropped some Benjamins on a Beaba Babycook, which we are currently testing for review; a few BabyBjorn Travel Cribs, which we loved but balked at the price of; and several Britax car seats - a Roundabout and two Boulevards. (Compare this with 18 Britax seat sales we tracked during their last semi-annual sale, and a bunch of Frontiers that sold after our in-depth comparison between it and its competition.) Any thoughts on these, users of very nice expensive products?

Interesting Baby Gear, Toys, Books, and Music You Bought

We'll skip the random items you added to your shopping carts to get free shipping or the really nice things that are totally non-kid-related that you clearly purchased through ZRecs to help give us a boost (thanks for that, by the way) and focus on a few on-topic purchases that caught our eye.

A couple of you picked up KidCo Adhesive Mount Magnet Locks, just the kind of product that usually makes our eyes glaze over. But these are a really great idea, a step above the kinds of cabinet locks we used with Z. A few reviews on Amazon seemed frustratingly surprised by the lack of keys in the set (yes, you have to buy the keys and locks separately) but I suspect the reason for this is that you just keep a couple of the keys around and use them for all the locks, which means you'd want to buy the locks separately. So if you bought or have used these, we really want to know: Do these work as well as you'd hoped?

Plan Toys has a really cute toddler pounding toy (they call it the Punch and Drop), with balls you knock into a box, and a couple of you purchased it, although we had never mentioned it.

We love almost every Plan Toy product we've handled (with one disappointing exception). The natural dyes they use, the way they sand stuff down, and the way they incorporate any other materials needed to enhance a product - in the case of this wooden toy, it looks like they have plastic or rubber seals that give the balls a resting place and provide some friction for pounding - is really top-notch. This design in particular makes a lot more sense than the wood-on-wood pounding of standard tool-bench style pounders - it's just so hard to get the wooden pegs and holes to match up at just the point of friction, and then they swell or shrink in different climates. We like the look of this toy almost as much as we like Plan Toys' Hammer Balls set, which is truly the standard-setter for this type of toy as far a we're concerned.

Someone also bought Plan Toys' Shape and Sort It Out set, which looks like a really nice version of a cheap Melissa & Doug version of the toy we had when Z was an infant and toddler.

A few of you are still buying Fred Party People Chopsticks, which we found to be one of the better inexpensive options for chopsticks for children in our Toddler Chopstick Showdown - a six-pack costs about $10. And a few of you have been picking up rattles from Sassy's cute, relatively new Earth Brights line, like this one. We like the way they're combining brightly-colored fabrics and wood in some of these infant toy designs.

You picked up some interesting books for your own perusal, including Home Comforts (our own family's favorite go-to guide for "the art and science of keeping house"), the intriguing The Complete Organic Pregnancy, The Top 100 Baby Purees, a nice alternative to the standard baby food cookbook, and A Child's Garden, a book offering "60 ideas to make any garden come alive for children." Somebody got a great-looking Eric Carle growth chart.

As for kids' books, we love poring over our sales summaries because our readers help us find great kids' books all the time. First, though, a couple we recommended seemed to go over well: Several of you bought Margaret Wise Brown and Leonard Weisgard's seminal The Important Book or Wendy Pfeffer and Robin Brickman's astonishing, beautiful A Log's Life - the former after we mentioned it as one of our Ten Favorite Kids' Books (you should check out the rest!), and the latter likely because we wrote that "there really isn't a more beautiful introduction to life cycles, food webs, and ecological niches than this lovely book." If you did buy either of these, tell us: Do you and your children love it as much as we do?

Several of you jumped at the chance to buy books in Jessica Spanyol's Minibugs series after we reviewed one earlier this week, or one of you bought every single one. Are they what you expected, based on our review?

Speaking of seminal, if there is any child who does not need ready access to The Monster At the End of This Book, which several of you bought in the past couple months, it is really the single most important Sesame Street book you could buy for $5. Michael Smollin's illustrations are fabulous and the story is a crack-up for anyone who has ever been afraid of anything, or wished that a character inside a book would try to destroy it.

Books you bought that we hadn't known about include the Skippyjon Jones books, which we are pretty sure Z is going to flip out over, and Arnold Lobel's Mouse Tales on CD. Lobel is a great reader of his own stories (we own his Frog and Toad stories on CD) and it was cool to discover this one too, which we'll probably spring for if it isn't at our local library. You also bought What's Alive?, one of so many well-conceived and surprising books in the Let's-Read-And-Find-Out Science series that we must, must, must get our own hands on. Seriously, we should own stock in this publisher.

ZRecs readers are big, big fans of Putumayo Kids CDs. The music series is good enough that if you have heard any, you are probably a fan too.

If You Bought It: What Did You Think Of It?

One of the best things about the community of readers that has developed around Z Recommends is their interest in sharing the pros and cons of kids' stuff they've tried. So if you own any of the products above, tell us what you think of them! We'll collect some of the most interesting feedback we get and highlight it in a later post, or even quote you in the ZRecs Guide listing for the product, where we're working on adding opinions on the products we cover from several additional sources. So browse the post above and take a moment to give us your two cents on products your fellow readers are probably thinking about buying right now! (If you're reading this post in your email or an RSS reader, click here to visit the post and comment.)

Like what you read on Z Recommends? You can have posts delivered for free every day via RSS or email, as well as occasional summaries of our links to other blogs, news articles, and websites from our Delicious feed (our alternative to published link roundups). If you're already a subscriber, please click through to this post if you like it, to let us know you'd like to see more content like this.