So what's the story behind the return abuse in India?
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.
India is basically a "low trust society". People in general have a mindset of "scarcity" and at every stage of their lives they try to micro-optimize for what's the best for them at that time. In the absence of good institutions, this often means that we get stuck in shitty Nash equilibria which have terrible, terrible outcomes for everyone involved, but are difficult to get out of.
It is not that everyone in India has no morals or behaves terribly. But the number of people who do are enough to spoil trust-based models that work in other countries by making them too expensive.
From a business point of view, the obvious question is - how do you create a circle of "trustworthy" people? If you could create such a circle, you could offer them special services (better return policies, lower rates for insurance and credit etc) to encourage them to consume more without worrying so much about abuse. This is one of the most exciting business problems in India and solving it is worth at least worth 10 billion dollars and that is probably an underestimate.
There is one company already that claims to have solving this problem as their primary long-term vision - Cred and that company is currently valued at > $2 billion even though currently their revenues are weak and any connection to the long term trust problem quite distant.
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.
I don't really know what the solution is. I think a phone rental business could spring up. Charge $10/day or something to rent a high end phone to folks to see how they like it.
My guess is that Bestbuy has more money so they can afford the rare demo phone getting stolen somehow. Funnily enough when I worked at Radioshack we often had people steal the fake phones that just played a video loop. Someone even tried to return a fake phone once saying that we sold them a broken device.
Think of it - if you are spending $1200 on an item, would you want to save $20 on it to get one that who knows who had for who knows how long? I sure wouldn't. You'd probably need to go at least $100 lower before it becomes somewhat appealing.