Can You Trust Your Paint and Hardware Store?

A Toolkit to Check Your Local Stores for

Advice and Supplies on Health Hazards

Goals and Objectives for Toolkit

A basic principle in business is that you excel at what you measure.  Retail stores measure their success by sales.  Some stores also measure customer satisfaction.  But what if a customer unwittingly and unknowingly poisons their children or their client’s children as a result of bad advice from the store’s clerks or the lack of supplies to do a project safely. 

IKE believes that few stores appear to take their customer’s health seriously enough to adequately train clerks.  There are glimmers of hope from trade associations or some chains but nothing firm or widespread.  Certainly no retail store has embraced the issue of competency on such critical issues as lead-based paint safety or integrated pest control.  Some retail stores have taken the easy road by telling clerks not to give advice regarding the critical issues ignoring the reality that they hire employees who want to help customers and find it difficult – if not impossible – to ignore a customer’s plea for help.

IKE’s goal is to get retail stores that sell pesticides and paint to:

§         Affirmatively provide customers with sound advice regarding the safe and effective use of pesticides and paints; and

§         Offer customers the information and products they need to protect children from the hazards of pesticides and lead-based paint. 

This toolkit is one step in achieving that goal.  With this toolkit and the supporting grant funds, IKE hopes to:

§         Demonstrate that the problems IKE found in Indianapolis are widespread;

§         Empower community-based organizations to hold their local retailers responsible for protecting customers;

§         Establish a network of advocates who share IKE’s goal to improve the quality of advice provided by retails stores regarding paint and pesticides and together will help it come to fruition; and

§         Help customers identify which stores are more committed to their health and safety and worthy of their patronage.

Please contact IKE’s Executive Director, Tom Neltner, at 317-442-3973 or mccabe@ikecoalition.org for more information on this effort.   

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