Parent company TJ Maxx to pay $13 million for sales of recalled products

The parent company of department store chain TJ Maxx has agreed to pay a $13 million fine for sales of approximately 1,200 recalled products over a five-year period, including products found to have put infants at risk of choking and death. a federal agency said: on Tuesday.

TJX Companies Inc., which also oversees retail chains Marshalls and HomeGoods, sold the recalled products from 2014 to 2019 in brick-and-mortar stores of its three subsidiaries, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, or CPSC.

Sales of the recalled products also took place online, the agency said.

In addition to paying the fine, TJX will maintain a series of internal controls to ensure the company is in compliance with the law prohibiting the sale of recalled products, the CPSC said. TJX has agreed to submit annual reports on its compliance program for five years, the agency added.

Most of the recalled products sold by TJX were recalled due to the risk of choking and infant death, including the Kids II Rocking Sleepers, Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play Sleepers, and Fisher-Price Inclined Sleeper Accessory for Ultra-Lite Day & Night Play Yards, the CPSC said.

“At TJX, product safety is very important to us and we prohibit the sale of recalled items in our stores,” TJX said in a statement. “We deeply regret that in some cases between 2014 and 2019, product recalls were not properly removed from our sales floors, despite the recall processes we had in place.”

“We have made significant investments in people, processes and technology to strengthen our processes and have worked fully with the Consumer Product Safety Commission,” the company added.

in 2019, CPSC and TJX jointly announced that TJX had sold 19 separate recalled products. Following the announcement, TJX notified staff that it subsequently discovered previous sales of three additional recalled products, CPSC said.

TJX reported revenue of $11.4 billion over a three-month period ending April 30, representing a 13% increase from the same three-month period a year earlier. The company reported earnings of $587 million for the three-month period ending in April.