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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

Cost of shipping? Time? Returning this kind of stuff is something Amazon if very good at. It won't cost you anything and they have dozens of ways of returning things (by mail, from a UPS store, from Kohls, they will come and pick it up, etc.) Returns are easy and free.

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My hourly rate after tax is about $50, let's say $60 for easy math. That means that returning a $7 item has to take less than 7 minutes to be worth it, less if there's other costs besides time. I'll easily spend that much time in the car.

In many (most?) cases time=money is a false equivalence because time spent doing something isn't necessarily always time you would be spending working, but the local postal services are only open during hours I would be working, so it's not a false equivalence in my case.

Receiving the item you ordered and paid for is easy and free. Returns are not.

Why are we even having this conversation? They sent me a box of clay when I ordered a car part. This isn't an ambiguous situation.

For the time you spent typing this comment you could have created a return and had UPS come pick up your package or in my experience, Amazon wouldn't have even required you to return the item and would have just sent you a replacement.

Also, I see your rationale and think you are really missing the point. You may have a small hourly rate of $60 and use that as justification but its complete garbage. I do better than that and I work with guys who literally make 10's of millions a year. Taking a preventable loss that only requires a phone call or a chat is foolish, even if it is $7.00.

If we're going to talk about missing the point: Which is the better way to prevent the loss?

1. Order item from Amazon, discover item is a block of clay, go through the Amazon returns process, reorder item, which may be a block of clay again.

2. Order item from a site that ships me the item I order instead of a block of clay.

So again, why are we talking about this? We can argue as much as we want about Amazon's return policies, but the return policy would be irrelevant if they had sent me the item I ordered instead of a block of clay.

Unless it's shipped direct by the seller in which case Amazon requires you to pay for shipping even if you have to send it all the way back to China. And they don't refund anything until the seller confirms it's received.

My fiancee had to ship a $20.00 dress that wasn't even the right color or anything like the picture back, costing $40.00, before Amazon would even refund her. And worse, the package actually bounced because the seller had folded at some point in the return period, so the package arrived right back on her doorstep. Because Amazon didn't have confirmation from the non-existent seller that the package had arrived at their non-existent company, she had to spend several hours on the phone with CSRs and different people haggling over what was essentially $60.00.

So no it isn't easy.

>My hourly rate after tax is about $50, let's say $60 for easy math. That means that returning a $7 item has to take less than 7 minutes to be worth it, less if there's other costs besides time. I'll easily spend that much time in the car.

This math is infuriating. Do you actually bill for every waking hour of your day? If not, this calculation is nonsense. My hourly rate is similar, but I only work 8 hours per day. I have plenty of time after work to do things like spend 7 minutes returning a cheap item. I have absolutely no desire to work 16 hour days even if I was paid overtime, so it's totally disingenuous to pretend that my time after work is worth the same exact rate as my "hourly" rate at work. (I'm actually salaried so if I did want to work more it would just decrease my hourly rate.)

Try reading the paragraph after the one you quoted.

Maybe it's just a lack of imagination on my part, but I can't imagine how that paragraph is actually true. When I'm in the Bay area, I take returns to the UPS store, which has pretty long hours. When I'm at my second home in the middle of nowhere, Amazon will schedule a pickup for free.

TBH I regret even dignifying the return idea with a response, because the return policy is a stupid distraction to begin with. The real point here is: it's better to order an item and receive that item, than to order an item and receive a block of clay instead. Is this really an argument we need to have? Return policy is irrelevant: if I had received the part I ordered I wouldn't have returned it.

One main benefit of a return is that it creates costs to Amazon (shipping, returns processing, then disposing of the returned product). I'd like to think this makes Amazon marginally more likely to do the right thing, because it takes the profit out of the problematic products.

Even better is to stop buying from Amazon in the first place.

Recent return to Amazon, my wife got me a Legos Creator kit (one with six sets of bags, probably 2500-3000 pieces). I started working on it, and was missing a piece. Now I'm pretty organized with my Legos. I open all of the bags for each step and keep the contents separate. I searched through all of the opened bags, the box, the floor and could not find it. Finally gave up, figuring it wasnt a critical piece and skipping for now wouldn't hurt anything. Started finding more and more missing pieces before realizing, I was missing a piece or two, but an entire bag of pieces.

My wife returned it and Amazon sent a replacement the next day. All my wife has to do for the return is drop it of at Kohls next time shes out running errands. Pretty painless really.

So, how does your return experience compare to not having to return at all, because you received a Legos Creator kit that has all the pieces?

Your experience is completely irrelevant. If Amazon didn't send out obvious counterfeits, you wouldn't have to return them, which is inherently easier than returning them no matter what the return process is.

But if everyone that receives a counterfeit item returns it, that costs Amazon a lot of money (they have to pay to return it and pay to ship you a new one - all on their dime). By not returning it you are just playing into their hands. Not only did they not have to send you a legitimate item, that they can now sell to someone else, but they didn't have to pay the roundtrip shipping fees (plus someones salary to deal with it when they get it back).

And this isn't even touching on being nice to other people. That counterfeiter can keep on sending blocks of clay to other unsuspecting people and you did nothing to help stop them.

I left a comment above about how much of a pain in the ass it is to even get Amazon to issue a refund if the item isn't FBA. It took my fiancee over a month of calling them before she got anything.

Best bet is to just not buy anything from Amazon.

Everything they do costs time. I have attempted to return several items to Amazon. One time they sent me a UPS label... but UPS wouldn't pick it up and I would have to walk it to a store. Another time it was a third-party vendor and I had to print the label myself, arrange for pickup, wait around for the pickup, etc... all because they sent me the wrong item. It is always a huge pain. Amazon's model is to get stuff to you, not to get it back from you.

Amazon returns are not always free. Oftentimes you have to pay shipping to return it.

This is only true for third-party sellers, right? I can't recall ever paying for a return for an item I purchased from Amazon.

Why are we talking about this?

I ordered a car part, I received a block of clay. This isn't a problem that is solved by any return policy.

True, but throwing away the block of clay and never even notifying Amazon of any issue surely does less than nothing to solve the problem.

Why exactly is it my responsibility to make up for Amazon's misdeeds?

Why do you keep saying that? You brought the topic up, don't do that if you're just going to get mad and say why are we talking about it over and over.

You became a sucker and helped contribute to others being suckers by doing absolutely nothing after very obviously getting scammed.

I made a mistake by bringing up returns.

The truth is, returns would be irrelevant if Amazon had done their job.

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