Baby Einstein Recall: Disney Offers Refunds for DVDs

Atlanta, GA 10/26/2009 01:39 PM GMT (TransWorldNews)



The Walt Disney Company is offering a refund for Baby Einstein DVDs, seemingly admitting the videos are not educational for babies.

Disney is offering anyone who purchased a Baby Einstein DVD between June 5, 2004 and September 4, 2009 full refund. No receipt is needed to collect a refund. The offer is valid until March 2010.

“We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds,” Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, says of Disney’s move.

Baby Einstein was founded in 1997 by Julie Aigner Clark. Disney acquired Baby Einstein in 2001.

OK...so it's not a joke...except it is on me. My wife gave all ours away last week while doing a clean sweep of the house.

Figgers.

Christmas fund might be overstating it, maybe a happy Christmas surprise? They're offering $15.99 each for up to four.

Maybe they're not educational, but if they get your kid to shut up for 15 minutes, it's worth the money.

Sorting out the truth about screen time for infants...

For the past several years, Baby Einstein has been under attack by propaganda groups taking extreme positions that try to dictate what parents should do, say and buy. Our philosophy has always been to focus on creating products that parents and babies love, and to not get sidetracked and pulled down into their street fight.

Unfortunately, with Susan Linn’s latest stunt, we cannot be silent any longer. Linn’s obvious dislike for Baby Einstein has now turned into a sensational, headline-grabbing publicity campaign that seeks to twist and spin a simple, customer satisfaction action into a false admission of guilt. This is clearly not the case.

Linn’s moves are carefully crafted to prey on parental guilt and uncertainty. This time, she began by asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to go after Baby Einstein because, she said, we claimed that Baby Einstein was educational. But we do not make any such claim – and the FTC brought no action.

Not content to rely on the judgment of the federal government, her attacks continued and escalated despite the fact that her assertions have no merit.

That’s where we are today. However, we took a very different approach. We strongly believe that, unlike Linn, our consumers find value in our product, and rather than continue to fight with her, we decided to leave it up to those consumers. That is why we extended a refund policy that was already in place. Although she would like to claim otherwise, there is nothing extraordinary about a company’s willingness to stand behind its product. To the contrary, it is the strongest possible show of confidence in it.

Baby Einstein announced this offer in a press release issued on September 4, 2009, which was largely ignored by the media. Linn’s latest public relations blitz simply distorts the facts and misleads the public. In the end, this smear campaign has everything to do with Linn trying to generate ink and funding for her cause, and not about the value that consumers find in our product.

Thank you for letting us set the record straight.

Sincerely,

Susan McLain
General Manager, The Baby Einstein Company

I wrote them a nasty email a while back because they INSIST on making their *&%&^$& stupid commercials for other products un-skippable on the DVD. So you have to watch the sales pitch every... single... time... you... watch... the... video. Not to mention, it takes FOREVER to get to the damn content because you need to sit through the baby Einstein commercial to get to the "hit play" menu. Made me almost lose my mind sometimes.

Yeah, that's a pretty annoying feature. You can skip the whole ad (next scene button, whatever), but that can take forever, you're right. At some level, I think kids think that's part of the video (maybe the most fun part); my son always wants to watch them. *sigh* No, really, man, they're just commercials.

Rebuttal is here:

*snip*