Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged

Maybe Apple could just give a discount if you give up your return option at the point of sale.

But I mean, those policies exist elsewhere, so I don't know what specifically makes Polish customers more prone to abusing those policies. I suspect it's the relative cost of a phone vs income.

Third party resellers essentially activated an iphone and marked it as lost. Then, after getting a new replacement iPhone from Apple, they would go on and sell it to customers.

Nowadays, you can only get AppleCare (not the plus) in India which does not cover theft or accidental damage.

1 - People buying a handful of phones and comparing them, then returning all but the one they decide to keep.

2 - Semi related, one of the ten thousand phone comparison Youtuber channels.

Indian culture is about display of wealth. Wealthy individuals are respected and get access to inner clubs while the people who don't have much don't get invited anywhere.

College students might want to leave a good impression at a party and might get an iPhone so people start taking them seriously.

Similarly, a guy might get an iPhone so his date considers him important.

iPhone is status symbol in India because not everyone can afford it.

I can certainly and easily afford it but I am still using android because I don't feel the need of uncessarry attention

If you had a Star Trek replicator in your home that could replicate a brand new iPhone for you for free that lasts a week then poofs out of existence, you'd go ahead and use it, probably more than once.

If you don't mind the hassle and the ethical, er, annoyance of going to a store, waiting in queues, having $1000+ temporarily blocked off from your savings, a bunch of back and forth with the sales people, etc, then that's equivalent to replicating yourself an iPhone for a week for free.

On the other hand, In the US, more often than not, you have to pack up your item and drop it off to a store to return it.

Many people also abuse return policies to buy expensive cameras, use them to shoot nice pictures on vacation and then sending them back. They can still keep the pictures, so the camera lost its value for them.

Apple has gone and done the analog of that; they've changed the returns code.

I don't see anything wrong with what Apple has done here, and if the US decided to tighten up the tax code, I wouldn't see anything wrong with that either.

To your actual point, I think it's about intent and spirit. The holes in the tax code were put there intentionally, to benefit businesses. We may not like it, but that's how it is. Businesses aren't violating the letter or even the spirit of the law when they avail themselves of it.

On the contrary, Apple sets their return policy based on a balance between good customer service and an estimate of how much that customer service will cost them to provide. They likely estimate this cost based on what they think is reasonable customer behavior. In this case they mis-estimated: apparently Indians don't behave within what they consider to be the spirit of that policy.

Another way of looking at it: the US government estimates tax revenue knowing that those loopholes exist, and is fine with the result. There are no budget-related surprises. Apple's estimates for the cost of returns in India was a large underestimation, so they're fixing their problem.

Maybe it's an overreaction to think about this as "returns abuse", but I don't see these two things as being the same.

I suspect there are a lot of business owners on HN. Current, future or past. So it's definitely possible.

If you break store policy, they don't send armed people to your house to fix the glitch.

You also seem to be comparing tax minimization (as distinct from tax fraud) with warranty/return fraud.

This is clearly unethical, but maybe not illegal.

If you are an honest seller, you can't even resell returned products as brand new.

Remember Costco permanently blocked some consumers due to abusing the return policy? Costco honors the policy, but those consumers were still considered as abusing the policy.

Yes, it is abuse.

Yes. Here, abuse means misuse, which must be interpreted relative to the intent of the ones making the policy (or else it's meaningless). The intent is clear: for customers to be able to return the item if they are not satisfied. It is not a borrow/rental policy.

What OP must clarify though is that apples authorised resellers in India do actually perform a good job of replacing defective goods under warranty, which makes getting extended care for apple products in India of paramount importance. Outside of warranty you are so screwed!

It depends on the circumstances, but in the UK and most of Europe, consumer rights are much stronger than in some other parts of the world.

Here in the UK, the basic rule is that the vendor who sold a product to a private individual is on the hook for anything that goes wrong -- that is, they can't just pass the buck to a manufacturer under warranty or some other fall guy, they have to deal with the problem or be held responsible. Whether the vendor can in turn recover any losses from the manufacturer or reseller who supplied them is then that vendor's problem, not the end customer's.

Usually if a product is defective, the next step will be to repair, replace or refund. The legal position tends to be based on both sides being reasonable. For example, if you have a product that fails earlier than you might reasonably expect but still after a couple of years of use, you might get a refund for part of the original purchase price but you probably wouldn't be entitled to all of it. On the other hand, if a product fails in the first few months and the vendor can't repair or replace it, you're probably entitled to a full refund and there is a presumption that the product was defective unless the vendor can prove otherwise. In some cases, rights to a partial refund might last as long as 6 years, if the product purchased might reasonably be expected to last that long but that one didn't.

Several other shenanigans that vendors try to pull elsewhere also don't hold up here. You can't rely on dubious arbitration terms in sale contracts to override statutory consumer rights. A vendor also must not mislead consumers over their rights, for example putting up a sign saying "no refunds" when the buyer might have a legal right to a refund for a defective product. In fact, it's actually illegal for merchants to mislead in that kind of way, which is why you'll see often notices up at the tills that say something like "your statutory rights are not affected" to make it clear that they're not trying to illegally misrepresent anything about those rights.

This is all in addition to any more generous policy a merchant might voluntarily offer or any warranty a manufacturer might offer on its products regardless of where someone buys them.

Most countries also have laws to give consumers a time period where they can return whatever they bought, no questions asked (as long as the product is in good condition)

And in general, the responsibility for the goods is always with the seller first, manufacturer second. If your laptop breaks and the seller says "oh the manufacturer declined warranty" then sorry, tough luck, it's the seller who has to repair/replace it now.

Uh, not at all.

Converted to USD and without tax below. Apple products are 11-16% more expensive in Europe

iPhone 12: US price $699 - Europe price without VAT $807

iPhone 12 Pro Max: US price $1099 - Europe price without VAT $1256

iPad Air: US price $599 - Europe price without VAT $667

Macbook Air: US price $999 - Europe price without VAT $1126

For example Apple in the US let me return a first gen 12.9” iPad Pro after about 4 months and exchange it for the 9.7” version the week it came out.

I would have expected a flat out no from retailers in Europe.

Now Apple doesn't do it. They push you to buy a new product whenever possible along with AppleCare+. Apple Retail employees dont run on commission in US ( Not sure if that is still the case). I remember someone said Apple Retail Italy runs on commission basis. I also know Apple Retail employees also has KPI based on AppleCare+ they sold in the past few years.

Yes.... the whole Apple Retail experience is going against how Steve Job originally envisioning it. For Tim Cook, it is nothing more than a cost center on balance sheet.

A better manager would figure out how to keep him as a paying customer...

I hear they'll still honor it in some obvious cases...

You were lucky and got it replaced under goodwill, as iPhone X has an IP67 rating[1] and specific about sea/salt water damage -- the kind you have described. Back home, you would have had to deal with a lot of grief[2].

[1] https://www.iphonehacks.com/2018/04/iphone-x-ip-67-water-res...

[2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204104

Games Workshop: a piece costs near nothing to them. It's just a piece of plastic. Makes a ton of economic sense to just replace it and keep customers coming back to buy more profitable plastic.

Starbucks: are a huge multinational that operate a sophisticated logistics network so shipping an item out is less than a thousandth of a rounding error in their daily P&L both in terms of money and time.

The real places to call out / praise are small independent shops where a single item purchased (or returned) could swing the daily revenue / profit one way or another.

They charged me $500 to replace the defective keyboard in the Mac Pro 2-3years back within 3 months of purchase and said I put glue on the key which came off.

I have a friend for whose new iphone 10 pro they refused to replace despite servicing the screen thrice and it clearly was manufacturing problem ( they agree) but will not replace the phone only the screen. He spent hours on the phone and no escalation he could do to get them to do it.

Every time i see in Europe or US, the service levels are starkly different, I have got replacement devices in minutes ,it is so bad in India that I and many people I know get their idevices serviced when we vist stateside.

I worked at a startup catering to Indian consumers. It was a typical transactional product coupled with offers. The time and energy we spent on fighting different kinds of abuse was outright insane. The fraudsters would come up with a new trick each week to abuse offers. No matter what check we placed (based on e-mail, phone number, IP etc., etc.,) they would beat it.

Based on my experience I can think of a few contributing factors.

1. Indian population. Lot of businesses underestimate this. They are used to reason in terms of %. But when you have a population of 1300 the % could still be within a threshold but absolute number would be larger than entire nations.

2. Outright incompetent cyber policing. The Indian consumers getting access to cheaper smartphone and internet exploded in the 2nd half of last decade. Naturally the country's police have just been unable to scale up to deal with new age crimes.

3. Poverty. It's super lucrative for young poor people to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities and abuse goodwill policies. The return policy is a good example. E-commerce companies in India are riddled with fraudulent return of goods. The modus operandi is simple enough. Order a smart phone, return a faulty/old one of the same model, sell the new one. Profit.

4. Extreme levels of corruption and vast geography. There are some well known cybercrime hotspot PIN codes but chasing the fraudsters is mostly futile. The police are mostly lethargic and more often than not are happy to work with the criminals to collect a weekly payment. It's more lucrative that way, why kill the golden goose?

5. Cheap internet, cheaper SIM connection. The country is awash with cheap bandwidth and SIM connection. To an extent you'll find new SIM packets lying on the sidewalk. This makes it extremely hard to tackle online frauds.

American Express, Visa, and Mastercard all have some kind of requirement that the merchant allows returns (usually 14 days minimum). Otherwise the consumer can file a chargeback and the resolution will go to the consumer in most situations.

In most situations, however, things are simply repackaged and sold as new. Clothing, for example, is commonly returned; then hopefully re-washed before selling again as new. In most situations this applies to electronics as well, although electronics can be different. There are stories out there of people buying new SD cards that had photos on them. Most companies have a return center that processes returns, inspects them, resets them, and repackages them to be sold again as new.

Exceptions are when returns are sent to stores… like Amazon or Best Buy handle returns differently than returns going back to the manufacturer.

Um ... When I buy for myself I look for open box products all the time. Steep discounts (sometimes 25% or more) are awesome for something that is essentially new. I don't give a shit about the unboxing experience unless it's a gift for someone else.