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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading the four hour work week years ago, and he said something like refund no questions asked.

Look, amazon offers refunds when people send back a brick instead of a computer and jeff bezos is rich enough to compete in the space race 2.0

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I think this is especially relevant in this case because this customer spent so much time and effort giving bad reviews that it seems like they must have genuinely felt that they had been screwed over, rather than being someone trying one on like your example of people returning a brick for a refund. Depending how you/they value their time, they probably spent more than that $4.99 posting those reviews. (Certainly, there are times when I would happily have spent $20 of my own money if meant $5 got taken from some business I felt had treated me badly.)

I sell a physical product, and this is my policy as well. I don't really care if I get the product back. I've learned that most customers calm down greatly, once they know two things:

1. They're interacting with a real person

2. They didn't just dump their money into a black hole

So I always start with empathy and an offer to refund their cost, and then proceed with the troubleshooting. Most of the time, it's something like, oops I put a dead battery in, or set it up wrong.

Refunds are part of the cost of doing business. I have an extremely high quality standard, to make sure those refunds are quite rare.

A person who used to blog about the online junk business said that the only reasonable policy is: Refund instantly, and ban the customer forever.

> Look, amazon offers refunds when people send back a brick instead of a computer and jeff bezos is rich enough to compete in the space race 2.0

I don’t do this. Not because I am a good person with morals but because I’m scared of being banned from Amazon.com Amazon.com can easily track what items I looked at and what items I place on my cart. What’s to stop them from tracking what items I return?

I have a friend who returns everything when he buys something new, once every year or two, for a full refund. He'll literally buy a phone, use it for a year, then claim it has a dead pixel, send it back for a refund and buy a new phone.

He hasn't been banned yet, though I kind of hope he does.

There’s always someone taking advantage and ruining it for everybody else.

Not defending fraud (in general or in this specific case), but who it being ruined for?

Amazon is still making fabulous amounts of money, prices are still low there, and the policy is still generous to the customer.

Unless the friend is only buying Amazon-branded products, the merchant is being screwed

It's the reason Amazon is getting more and more strict on such returns. Legitimate users are punished.

In my view it hurts the suppliers who are trying to do business through Amazon. It also hurts other customers, since it reinforces the idea that you can ship stuff with unknown or intermittent quality, and let the return process serve as your quality control.

You would like the Stainless Steel Rat scifi series of books by Harry Harrison. :)

I kind of wonder if people like this get "shadowbanned" and how it would work.

GPT-3 customer support bot apologizing for the delay.

Broadly, US customer service return policies, despite what we hear, is superlative compared to most of the rest of the world [1]. If you travel a lot, the kind of return policies Americans broadly enjoy are pretty much non-existent outside the US, due to a relatively unique history of retail and general trust.

Culture is in general becoming a less pleasant, asshole-take-all experience because your "friend" embodies how trust and social fabric is corroded away. Not by big, monolithic, evil entities people like to rant upon here, but by everyday people like him making poor choices.

Choose better decisions [2].

[1] https://qz.com/772273/the-sneaky-genius-of-americas-lenient-...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/elal2/have_you_e...

Neither I nor he live in the US, alas.

Monetary systems are (very poorly designed, highly lossy) attempts to quantify trust in many dimensional axes. Corrode trust, then the cost of trade goes up.

When I notice decisions made by people like what your friend does, if talking about it doesn't produce a change in choices, I instantly distance myself from them and then gradually cut them out of my life. Ethics is what you do when you think no one is looking on. Your mileage may vary, but personally, I have too little time in my life to spend on people who I have to worry about whether they will screw me over if the situation is just right. The cognitive load is not worth it.

It might not be trust or customer service... it might be that americans have rights afforded to them via credit card laws. You can initiate a chargeback against the vendor and get your money back.

And for fraud... in the US you can lose max $50 to a credit card fraud incident ($500 if you are really negligent) by law.

So I think americans enjoy protections not available in other parts of the world.

I actually think this makes good sense. It eliminates the need for people "to take things into their own hands", or be overly cautious, so spending is increased.

I think it was matt ridley's book the rational optimist (?) that said that trust correlates with trade.

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