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Comment by nathantotten | Hacker News Reader

I frequently shop at Home Depot. Last year I was remodeling my bathroom and I had some extra parts (unused) and I went to return them. I was mistakenly flagged by Retail Equation and several of the things I was returning were denied. It was extremely frustrating as I had bought thousands of dollars of merchandise and was literally trying to return less than $40 of stuff.

I asked to talk to the store manager, she said there was nothing she could do. To me, the real problem with these systems is that relying on them too much removes the ability for people to provide good customer service.

Fortunately for me, I don't give up so easily. I guessed the email address of the CEO of Home Depot and wrote him. The next day the VP of Loss Prevention called me and then called the store. They let me return my merchandise the next time I tried. ;)

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>I asked to talk to the store manager, she said there was nothing she could do. To me, the real problem with these systems is that relying on them too much removes the ability for people to provide good customer service.

Funny thing, GDPR which is looked down here, has provisions concerning this problem: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ You can appeal automated decision making and companies have to provide you with such an option.

It's moronic. These retailers know whether you recently purchased the item you're returning.

Why are they counting it against you?

Agreed, this seems to turn a simple database lookup into a ml classification problem.. presumably this only happens for people who don’t provide a phone number or name?

Because recent buyers are among the prime suspects for abuse, since some people will exploit retailers' lenient return policies as a free rental service. They'll buy something expensive, use it a handful of times during the conventional 30-day return window, and then return the used, depreciated item to the store for a full refund.

This item then has to be liquidated or refurbished, but even if it didn't, you've still probably lost the margin you made on it just by handling the return. Margins per unit are in typically in the realm of a few bucks, at best. Pennies count in retail.

You can get away with this a few times, but more than that, and a backend system like this will flag you as a "serial returner" and instruct the staff to refuse your return.

It'd be great if they could make it easy to allow managerial override, but unfortunately, many managers or other store employees work in cahoots with civilian accomplices to rip off the retailers with this type of scheme.

I’m perplexed why this comment is being downvoted. I found it informative, plausible and well reasoned. That said, if there is evidence against the authors position, I’d love to see it to better help my understanding.

Yeah, that’s how expensive cameras were abused in old days with 30 day return policies and without restocking fees. Thanks to this, the return window is 14 days along with restocking fees for electronics items.

I find it profoundly unlikely that anyone is risking their salaried positions to help neighbor bob free rent a few tools.

Walmart operates in a lot of areas where the jobs are all dead end, low paying, or treat workers poorly. They do a lot of that themselves. It's why they have high turnover and theft among employees. They still have high turnover and theft after upping their wages. I rarely see the same person twice at the local one. In such environments, the people who are used to pulling for each other with favors will certainly do things at the companies' expense for friends or in trade for anothers' items.

They figure they'll be at another crap job in near future or just won't get prosecuted, that Walmart is a racket not giving them anything for their work, that they're corporate evil that deserve no sympathy, and so on so forth. So, why not get something in return or hook their friends up while they're there?" they'll ask. That's how some explained it to me that were fired for stealing or doing stuff for friends at various retail places. They're so good at risk assessment they tell people like me they barely know about what they do. It's unreal lol.

Note: I ran into this stuff mostly in low-income areas both city and rural. Gets worse if the management treats workers worse.

"Because recent buyers are among the prime suspects for abuse, since some people will exploit retailers' lenient return policies as a free rental service. They'll buy something expensive, use it a handful of times during the conventional 30-day return window, and then return the used, depreciated item to the store for a full refund."

I've met people who have bragged about doing that. So, it's a real thing. I always wondered if AutoZone's tool lending policy for customers was to just to help them or to partly counter people buying/returning tools just to fix an immediate problem. The main difference is the tool lending process requires them to hold your ID until you give the stuff back. Plus, it's a spare set in the back whose use doesn't reduce value of their main stuff.

I bet Walmart gets hit with hundreds of thousands to millions a year worth of returns for one-off uses of their products alone. Especially automotive or home improvement.

Autozone’s tool rental (free) sells parts they sell, parts you might not otherwise be able to install without those tools.

They definitely do not hold your ID, except perhaps to lend you the tools to replace your battery in the parking lot. Forcing a customer to drive without a hard copy of the driver license is not smart. The deposit you pay to rent the tool is identical to the purchase price. This is true for several states, including California.

Some of their rentable tools are better than the tools available for retail sale while costing less or including better accessories like a sturdy case.

I kept several rental tools. I rented a few with intent to purchase them and told that to the store personnel so they could order a replacement. One of my favorite tools is a serpentine belt wrench. The rental version comes with a case and a couple of extra crow foot wrenches. The retail version has fewer accessories and no case.

Some locations now only rent for 48 hours. I had no problem returning those rentals after a week.

Replacing suspension components often requires specialty tools.

You abd I might be talking different services. They did take our ID but charged us nothing. This has happened at several locations where we had a broken down car nearby. Maybe the policies vary by store or state. This was both in TN and MS.

Not sure if it's still a thing, but I knew of people who'd buy something for a special occasion and then return it after the occasion or special event was over. I'm sure retail apparel is not oblivious to this practice.

One scheme I saw while employed at a Best Buy store many years ago. Employee uses employee discount to purchase greatly overpriced $35 usb cable for employee cost $5. Non-employee accomplice returns cable without receipt and receives store credit for $35. Rinse and repeat. I assume that loop hole has been closed, but it was my department manager's sibling who first explained this to me.

In every instance where they can verify you purchased it returning it is a snap.

I like the intent, but given the obvious loopholes, I'm doubtful this has the desired effect.

It'll be interesting to see if this provision is actually doing anything in a year or so.

That’s great for Europe, but there is nothing similar in USA

There will be such a law, I am sure, and because companies abusing lack of law, the law will be draconian. Most likely, such law will be introduced after discovery of great abuse by one of market leaders.

Absolutely ! Store policy is : please write out your complaint about our returns decision in triplicate, and submit the first copy to our office in Chersky, Siberia, Russian Federation (tiny small detail: town only accessible during the summer months, and even then, it's a bit of a gamble). Opening hours are from 9:00 am to 9:01 am, 3 days out of every decade, announced 2 hours in advance.

Home depot has a real problem (I assume all retail does - my sister works Home Depot returns so I hear stories) with people who go into the store grab something, leave, then come back (perhaps to a different store) and return it "I don't need it". It is often obvious to the clerk this is what just happened, but how do you prove it?

What's wrong with that?

"grab" as in "didn't pay for"

I assume by 'grab' they mean shoplift or less politely, steal.

There's also the trick of rooting through the store garbage for receipts, then going through the store to find the corresponding items and 'returning' things you never bought with the found receipt.

A friend of mine found some shoes she liked in the right size at the wrong price in one store, and in the wrong size at the right price in another. She bought both and "returned" the wrong sized ones to the higher priced store.

Return policy arbitrage. Cool!

This really seems like a solved problem in Australia. Once you leave the store with your purchase your reciept is stamped. If a stamped reciept is coming out of the store it's a simple check of the date and time, which can be verified by a checout-person. Ezpz. The biggest issue for theft that I saw was putting other items inside the box of a larger item. Say you buy a lawn mower, walk the box around the store, put some other items inside that box, pay for the lawn mower.

Returns are mandated here though and I guess the US is anti-consumer in a lot of ways so companies won't really be forced to find solutions that don't explicitly benefit them.

Your proposed solution doesn’t resolve the issue you’re responding to, or a number of other issues I can think of. And it doesn’t resolve any issues for returns without receipt, which is definitely a large concern.

I really don’t think Australia has this solved any better than the US, if this is the only solution.

Nobody has much trouble with these sorts of returns. Its stores that have more liberal policies like letting you return without a receipt that in turn must use something like TRE to flag fraud, theft, and abuse.

Of course if you only allowed returns strictly with proper receipts all your challenges shockingly disapear except the all the people that are pissed off because their return is denied instead of only the minority now.

What about gift returns?

I think the automated system can do a bunch to stop fraud, but in the OPs case, a local manager should be able to do a common sense test to provide the customer the appropriate level of service instead of being flagged a hard no.

Home Depot had USD$88.5 B revenue for 2016.

Kroger had $108 B.

Walmart had $485.9 B.

When you're selling that kind of volume, you're not doing it without algorithmic help.

Absolutely agree that OP should have been able to more easily get an in-person override. But I understand why the original rejection happened: or rather, I understand why HD uses a data mining company to attempt to prevent theft.

PS: Side note, you'd be surprised how big of a chunk of theft directly involves receipts / returns in some way or another.

The number can’t tell you that in isolation: Home Depot might gross that much but they also have hundreds of thousands of employees at thousands of stores. The amount of money a particular manager is responsible for is going to be a lot more reasonable, especially when you think about how much of that is going to be a few contractors buying large amounts on a regular basis.

In any case it’s ridiculous that a manager can’t look at someone’s history of buying lots of stuff and override a one-time return for a fraction of a percent of their recent history.

Ridiculous until you realize that there's an approximately equal percentage of internal and external theft in retail.

The right answer here is that the algorithm probably screwed up in this instance. There was a clear signal for a legitimate customer: large order, small return.

If your concern is pervasive internal theft by your managers you need a lot more than this speed bump.

Saying that the algorithm screwed up is confusing a symptom with the problem: making business processes so inflexible that local staff cannot correct mistakes.

> When you're selling that kind of volume, you're not doing it without algorithmic help.

These companies have been profitable for a long time prior to now. Why is it that they suddenly need algorithmic help?

I'd be very surprised if their net margins haven't shrunk, comparing 50 or 100 years ago.

If you're running a < 5% net profit margin, as most of these businesses are, then 1.5% inventory shrink (approx average) is a pretty big deal.

Unfortunately this then enables fraud by allowing the manager to collude with someone and override the 'no' for fake returns by them, perhaps splitting the 'profit' generated. Perhaps the loss from this sort of white collar crime was predicted to be too high to be worth it.

I'm admittedly not used to thinking at the management scale of these sort of big-box retailers, but I'd think "we can't systemically trust our store managers to not commit fraud" is on its own a large problem that merits solving outside of trying to plug all potential fraud vectors.

Usually, the fraud doesn't involve with managers. Usually cashiers or customer service folks in the return counter collude with customers: switching upc codes to swap a high price item with a low price one. LP (loss and prevention) usually focus more about this kind of collusion than a random $10 theft.

In a case I know of, LP colluded with the customer service manager to steal $10K cash, by shifting the camera focus from the money counting area. In this case, both the LP manager and the customer service manager got fired, and, of course, without any charges, since there is no proof.

At Fry's electronics, to return a product, LP has to key in his password as well. If the price of returned product is more than $300, LP and some other manager have to key in their passwords.

I'm not sure local retail managers have any discretion anymore. They no longer actually run the store.

Require a receipt for all returns?

Or, as many stores do now, only issue store credit/store specific gift cards when there is no receipt for the return. That way, even if they are stealing and returning or a serial return junkie, the "money" is only useful in that store. It will still count as a profitable sale.

With a receipt and/or the credit card you bought with is pretty common.

Yeah.. I'm confused; I return a lot of stuff at hardware stores, because I suck at buying the right things. If I don't have a receipt, returns differ by brand:

- Menards; just added ability to look up your receipt yourself at their self-help terminals, so now they require you find the receipt there

- Lowes; requires the card you bought it on

- Harbor Freight; can help find the receipt, or will give in-store credit

- Home Depot; no idea, who shops here, it's way more expensive and they have nothing in stock lol

With home improvement returns make sense. You’re going to want to start the day with more than you’ll need for certain jobs.

Menard's is great. If you don't remember when you bought the item, you just scan it and they look up when it was purchased using your card.

I didn't even know you could return anything anywhere without a receipt.

Home Depot will allow it. I've done it - they don't like it (the odds are much higher that you stole it in the first place), but they will allow it. Enough customers who spend a lot of money at the store return things all the time that they need to make this a pleasant experience so they keep coming back.

Note that on the scale of Home Depot the guy complaining is a small customer. The big customers spend thousands of dollars there very week and return 10s of dollars every week. (buy 100 2x4, use 95 and return the 5, then repeat 100 for the next project tomorrow - they need the return because they have to pass the receipts on to their customers who might check to be sure they are not cheated out of $20 on a $15000 project)

> * Home depot has a real problem (I assume all retail does - my sister works Home Depot returns so I hear stories) with people who go into the store grab something, leave, then come back (perhaps to a different store) and return it "I don't need it". It is often obvious to the clerk this is what just happened, but how do you prove it?*

Isn't that why receipts are printed?

Simple: in Australian we require proof of purchase. Typically the receipt from the store you bought it from, and the item must be returned to that store.

Australia’s largest home / hardware store also checks the items your taking against your receipt and stamps your receipt upon exiting the store, thereby reducing the incidence of thieves walking in empty handed and taking the item again while claiming they’ve already paid for it.

Why doesn’t Home Depot do something similar?

Home depot can look up the purchase same store if you can provide the card you paid for it with at the same store, the physical receipt, an electronic copy of the receipt that is automatically offered with each transaction which must be declined by the customer each and every time, your pro extra number (electronic purchase tracking), the order number if ordered online or special ordered. It is even possible to return without a receipt provided you don't make a habit of it sufficient to get flagged.

Categorically the only people on earth having trouble with this lose receipts, say no to electronic copies of the receipt, and come back in all the time without receipts.

Home depot has about the friendliest return policies of any major retailer I've ever shopped with.

That doesn't provide 100% of the picture though.

Assuming the "largest home / hardware store" means Bunnings, this w/e I returned items to a different store but with a receipt - so that was simple, but different to what you've stated.

Not long ago I return $175 worth of goods without receipts (after return $300 with receipts, because apparently I lost some...) to a different store to the one I bought from. They checked my ID and I assume I'm now on their loss prevention records; but from what I know that's not likely to be an issue until there's an obvious pattern of abuse.

Bunnings definitely have people returning items that they've stolen from one store and returned to another without a receipt, but they have a loss prevention team to try and reduce that.

It's the trade off of reduced friction (and increased purchases) vs theft - eg I wouldn't have bought everything I did if I was concerned that the returns process wouldn't be seamless.

Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but I've had only excellent experiences with Bunnings staff on both returns and warranty claims.

Thanks mate, I never actually knew why the security guard at JB HiFi always needs to stamp my receipt.

I returned a ~$150 item to Myer a few months ago, with nothing but a transaction ID provided to me over the phone by American Express (the account had been closed and I had no access to the credit card statements).

It turns out that the credit card network's transaction ID is completely useless to store staff and doesn't correspond to anything they can search up.

They went ahead and decided that the fact I could give them an ID number at all is sufficient proof of purchase and happily exchanged it.

(Of course, in this case I was returning a defective item and they're legally obliged to replace it - perhaps they're stricter on change-of-mind.)

Yep, as someone living in Australia, this whole article and thread baffles me.

Why would a store ever accept returns without a receipt?

The whole process is even more convenient now that email receipts are becoming common.

  Why doesn’t Home Depot do something similar?

Generally speaking, it's illegal to detain someone from leaving without probable cause of a crime.

(In contrast, Costco is empowered to do so via their membership agreement.)

IAAL :)

"Generally speaking, it's illegal to detain someone from leaving without probable cause of a crime. (In contrast, Costco is empowered to do so via their membership agreement.)"

This is commonly thought but not quite right, either on facts, or on law.

First, people cite a membership agreement.

Let's take a look:

https://www.costco.com/wcsstore/CostcoUSBCCatalogAssetStore/...

https://www.costco.com/member-privileges-conditions.html

Nothing there.

Maybe it's elsewhere. Can't easily be found (not good for Costco!)

It does say they can adopt rules at any time. But false imprisonment requires voluntary consent, which is knowing. So that would not help them.

Besides that, false imprisonment, in most states, is both a felony and a tort :)

The answer to the question "are you likely to be able to sue costco successfully for trying to check your receipt when you don't want them to" - no, unless you revoke consent and they don't revoke your membership and kick you off the property :)

The answer to the question "can they legally detain you" - also no if you revoke consent (and the first person to say something about the 4th amendment here loses, since we are talking about private actors).

Voluntary consent is definitely a valid defense to false imprisonment. However the idea that consent in the membership agreement overrides anything that later happens is, at best, laughable.

Imagine the membership agreement says "you unconditionally consent to costco locking you up in the backroom until they get bored".

Do you think I don't have a false imprisonment claim, if, when they try to do so, i say "I do not consent to this", and they do it anyway?

How is that voluntary consent? Even if i did consent, i clearly and unequivocally revoked it. Maybe i breached a contract. Irrelevant, however. Remember, it's both a tort and a crime. Even if they have an argument about the tort (they don't really), they don't about the crime.

There is plenty of precedent on revocation of consent all the way up the Supreme Court (United States v. Drayton, etc). Saying "no" to a receipt checker and walking away almost certainly counts as proper consent revocation.

Now Costco certainly has the right to revoke my membership and remove me from their property. But they can't certainly can't detain me though once i've revoked consent. It even may have a reasonable argument that the first time it tries to detain me, it was within the consent (depends on what happens in the above story).

The second i revoke my consent by saying no, sorry, it's clearly false imprisonment (in states that don't have a shopkeepers privilege).

  Nothing there.

In the "General Policies" section in your first link, we find:

  Costco reserves the right to inspect any container, backpack, briefcase, etc., upon entering or leaving the warehouse.

One key claim Costco makes in justifying the inspections is to make sure you got everything you paid for. I have personally experienced at least three cases over the years where the process worked to my benefit.

Once (that I can remember), an item was misplaced by the checker into the items of the patron behind me (I had paid for something I wouldn't have gotten out the door with).

And at least twice, back when they accepted Discover and would allow up to $50 cash back on a purchase, I didn't realize that I hadn't gotten the money... only to have the receipt-checker proactively ask me if I got the cash. In both cases, a subsequent count of the register confirmed it, and I got the full amount of cash.

So, I'm content with Costco's process, but I don't allow proactive checks anywhere else (e.g. Fry's).

" Costco reserves the right to inspect any container, backpack, briefcase, etc., upon entering or leaving the warehouse. "

Errr, that doesn't give them the right to detain you, so no, that's not it. This is the more general stealing provision, and

1. Not even close to the same as receipt checking.

2. Probably void in a number of states (where receipt checking would not be)

  that doesn't give them the right to detain you

Nobody's arguing that they have a power to detain you without probable cause, but they can (and have, many times) cancel a membership for noncompliance. But to say there is "nothing there" in the agreement on the topic is disingenuous.

Of course, those who aren't members anyway aren't really risking anything.

Wal-Mart gives gift cards instead of money if you don't have a receipt for a return. Toys R Us used to give Jeffery Dollars for returned toys.

The system at some stores make it hard to return stuff, while others make it easier. If the customer is happy they will return later to buy more stuff if not happy the go somewhere else like a competitor.

It's unfortunate, but I have seen the other side of the coin. Waiting in line behind people in the return line that have obviously bought stuff at yard sales or similar, and trying to return it for cash. No idea why they don't weight "proof of purchase" higher in their algorithm though.

What about gift returns?

The same thing happened to me: doing a remodel, spent thousands of dollars at Home Depot, returned a small fraction of it, banned.

The ban seems to have expired, but for three years I had to get my wife to go return things for me.

And all this for what? "In some rare cases, less than one tenth of one percent of returns, we catch something fraudulent".

"Despite 99.9%+ of this activity being perfectly reasonable, we see fit to limit it because it might help us catch <0.1%"

Was the email you guessed perhaps first.last@homedepot.ca?

you can mostly guess these emails because they all use predictable patterns.

The trick I use is to just find any random persons email with a google search (ex "@homedepot.com") and use the same pattern for the person I am trying to reach at the given organization, it works most of the time.

I honestly don’t think many executives are trying to hide their emails that hard. Steve Jobs always got a lot of press when he would reply to customers, but the reality is that executives actually value this communication. It helps them learn of problems they may otherwise be insulated from. Of course executives generally also don’t make their email too readily available because then everyone would contact them and that wouldn’t scale.

I have emailed various executives over the years and don’t recall it ever not working. It even worked with Comcast to my surprise - the next day someone from some department like “executive customer service” contacted me.

Be aware that these guys rarely read their email themselves. They have a dedicated team that handles all these requests, usually on their own.

(I’m not an executive, but I have good insights)

Fine, but that's even better.

It means they are doing something like using the execs inbox as a black-box monitoring stream to find out about problems that internal info gathering will miss. And better still, actually paying people to triage the alerts!

Yeah, this of course happens at the CEO levels, but I don't think it undermines the principle. If those people reading the emails are empowered to actually fix problems and if they are reporting back experiences to the CEO or relevant executives the information still makes it into the org.

In my experience, based on the email thread I think the CEO of Home Depot actually did read it. I left out a step in my story. What actually happened is the VP of Loss Prevention emailed me asking for my number so he could call me. I gave it and he called me. He actually replied to me via the original email. From the thread I could tell that the CEO forwarded it to the VP of Home Depot North America with something like "Jane, can you look into this?" then that person forwarded it to the VP with a more specific request. Based on my internal experiences at big companies this is pretty common.

Jeff bezos sends all his mail to a low grade support team in India who have terrible canned responses

Hilarious if true, given that Amazon frontline support is generally excellent.

I tried jeff@ once. I received a quality reply in <24 hours and my issue was resolved. As far as I can remember the English was perfect.

I got a canned reply that didn't address the fundamental issue, but yes the English was perfect.

This has been my experience as well, I emailed Lisa Su about some issue I was having with an AMD product and she (or her team that monitors her email) were very responsive and helped me sort my issue out.

Heh, I did the same kind of thing with a government agency. Well, more like 50 addresses.

I got a few replies.

Now I'm filing an Access to Information request to see what happened with all of the emails.

That should work for almost any reputable company. They know that pissed off customers are loud, and they know those customers will probably try to email the CEO. So make it easy, and let the executive response team turn a loud angry customer into a happy, content customer.

I don't abuse it, but let me tell you, when I emailed Mary Barra @ GM a few months ago because the regular customer service was having no luck finding the car I had already ordered and paid for, even though OnStar showed it 20 miles away -- a gal from the executive response team called me a couple hours later and she already located the car, had someone on-site do a physical verification, and arranged for a truck to go pick it up and take it to the dealer so I could take delivery. Then she called several more times over the next couple days to make sure everything from that moment forward was going smoothly.

She turned me from a rapidly-getting-more-angry customer to a much more relaxed, happy customer with a bit of renewed faith that GM isn't totally a lost cause ;-).

I’ve found that this is a non-issue as long as you still have the receipt and/or credit card used for purchase.

This seems like a legit response for returns without a receipt.

Yikes, that's pretty horrific. I think I'll be paying with cash at these places from now on.

What is it you would hope to accomplish with that?

by paying cash he avoids getting a credit card discount and other purchase protections but at least he gives the store a discount on processing fees.

Nothing to tie it to "you" so it's not your card that's used in conjunction with other items in the bad-item-returner flagging algorithm. Many stores ask for ID to return items in different circumstances (e.g. cash purchase, wanting cash back or not accepting store credit, etc).

They don't need to tie the purchases to you. Only the returns. Even in cases where you are banned from a store for excessive returns, you are still perfectly allowed to keep shopping there. You just can't return anything.

So when you return items, they will ask for your id, even if you paid cash originally.

That doesn't actually solve the issue many times.

Some stores simply require an ID for any and all refunds. The reason for this is fraud, actually: I worked at a retail pharmacy in the US, and we had a group of people that would look through the trash to find cash receipts. They would proceed to another store to steal the merchandise, and then to a third store to refund the item.

Nearly all stores require ID if you do not have a receipt and enter it in their system. It might not be your card, but it'll be tied to your name and ID.

Would not the receipt be id to the store some how?

No reason a store can't require an ID to return something.

Not really. Sure, it is proof of purchase, but we are talking fraud. Lots of folks throw receipts away.

These folks searched the trash cans. Got receipts out that said method of payment was cash, stole the item and "returned" it. Yet another scam is to take such receipts from the trash, buy the item at a discount, and then return it to a more expensive store.

Sure, the store can see the item was paid for by someone, and even see the store it was bought from. But it can't know if the person just found the receipt and is returning stolen goods or goods bought elsewhere so long as the barcode matches up.

Even if I get banned from returning, if it's a high value item I can get a friend to do the return or even pay someone if needed. I'm yet to have shopped anywhere that requires ID for a return too though, but even if that changes, cash is still a massive improvement in this sense.

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