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Comment by 0xffff2 | Hacker News Reader

>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.)

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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.

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