Corporate Crisis

In August of 2008 and March of 2009, Macy's had a nationwide recall on 33,000 children's sweatshirts and sweaters. The recall was for a drawstring the sweatshirt had that has been prohibited since 1996 on children's clothing because of a choking hazard. The strings are nonfunctional ties on the garment, but still are not allowed under the Consumer Product Safety Commission rules and regulations. The recalled products were sold in Macy's stores.

Macy's posted the recall on their website, where it also gave information as to why the product was being recalled and what customers who had the defective product should do, either return the product for a full refund or cut the ties off the product. The crisis was handled by trying to inform customers who bought the product about the recall.

As far as I can tell nothing was done to notify shareholders about the recall, other than the recall posting on the company's website. Despite that, I think Macy's did a good job handling this crisis. Macy's needed to make sure that the customers who bought this product knew about the recall, to avoid this crisis from escalating and someone being hurt from the product. No deaths were reported from using this product, so the company did a good job of making people aware of the harm that could come from the product. I would have made sure that this was one of the first things that customers could find on the website at the time of the initial recall. Right now the recall information is somewhat hidden in the customer service portion of the website. So that customers have to know where to look to find the recall information.