The 99 Cents Only Stores will pay a pretty penny to the federal government for selling household products containing unregistered or mislabeled pesticides.
The Southern California-based discount chain was ordered to pay $409,490 for violating the pesticide safety statute, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, the Los Angeles Times reports. It’s the largest penalty ever ordered by an administrative law judge in a contested case brought under the act, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The company racked up 166 violations, all but two related to a household cleaner called “Bref Limpieza y Disinfección Total con Densicloro,” imported from Mexico. That Spanish translates to “Bref Complete Cleaning and Disinfectant With Densicloro.”
One of the main problems, the EPA said, is that Bref’s label is completely in Spanish, making it impossible for non-Spanish speakers to read the ingredients or know how to properly use the product. In addition, the product is not registered with the EPA as a pesticide, so the agency has no data on its efficacy in killing common, potentially deadly kitchen bacteria like salmonella, according to the judge’s decision in the case. The company also continued to sell Bref after being notified by the EPA that it was selling an illegal pesticide.
The other two products were “Farmer’s Secret Berry & Produce Cleaner” and “PiC BORIC ACID Roach Killer III.” According to the EPA, the former is an unregistered pesticide, while the latter was misbranded, with labels upside down or inside out, making them hard to read.
“What you don’t know really can hurt you. You can’t take precautions and you can end up using products in very harmful ways,” Jared Blumenfeld, the agency’s regional administrator for the Pacific Southwest, told the Times.
In an interview with the Times, 99 Cents Only President Jeff Gold said the company had adopted stricter measures when buying products from its suppliers to “reduce the chance of these things happening in the future.”
“Our customer safety and quality of our product is always first and foremost in our mind, and we would never want to do anything intentionally to compromise that,” he said.
