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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

He often did pay for that. That's the point of the 10% restocking fee.

This disconnect is precisely why you can get a refund in the US but not in India.

There's the "letter of the policy" interpretation, where anything the text of the policy doesn't explicitly forbid is A-Okay. And then there's the "socially acceptable norms" interpretation, where you're only supposed to ask for refunds when a product is actually defective, and if you go any further than that, society and HN comments will shame you for it.

In the US, we have a thriving culture of shaming people for anything and everything, so companies can have generous policies and lean on the social norms interpretation to keep people in check. India is more of a free-for-all, so companies feel the need to spell everything out.

> In the US, we have a thriving culture of shaming people for anything and everything, so companies can have generous policies and lean on the social norms interpretation to keep people in check.

Consumers in US can buy a product without the anxiety of not having read the fine print, knowing that the seller will honor the return policy. Sellers also end up selling more because most buyers like the product they buy. Society wins overall.

I have lived both in India and US, about two decades each at both places.

Oh I agree, this is definitely a tragedy-of-the-commons situation. I was mostly joking about the shaming bit because of all the sibling comments.

I think the calling out is justified. Having lived in India, it is a country filled with these Smart Alecks who ruin it for everyone. I find it the duty of the general public to call these out, if we want to keep good things.

Your friend was treating a return policy as a rental policy. I don't think that's in the spirit of a return policy.

Are we going to blame people for not buying WinRaR licenses next? These are businesses, they offer the policy for a variety of reasons, I am free to use them within the terms; it sounds a bit out there to categorise returning a product in a “no questions asked return” policy as unethical unless I actively sabotaged the product or did anything other than use it and give it back.

I find it unethical because the net effect is that companies stop offering friendly return policies. When people treat return policies by the letter of the agreement rather than by its spirit, they create a world where companies won't offer relaxed return policies, and therefore make the world a bit worse for everyone else.

It's not illegal to use the agreement in this way, and I would never try to make it so. But I would absolutely look down on someone for behaving this way.

Not that you don't make a point with this, I do have to say that Winrar hasn't changed how they handle their licensing/usage to combat this. I suspect they're "okay" with it so to speak as a result.

The fact that businesses change their policies as a result of abuse should tell you whether these actions are within the spirit of what they intended or whether it's outside of it.

You shouldn't be angry that Apple is changing the terms then.

The 10% restocking fee is a compromise between offerring a permissive return policy that gets abused and none at all. I have always understood it to be a deterrent and not the exact amount that must be recouped in order to make returns net zero loss events.

No, that isn't the point of that at all. 10% isn't so you can use a card and then give it back. 10% is so the staff can package it up, send it back to the manufacturer so they can resell it. Or so they can mark it as "refurbished" and recoup some of the lost value of a new card.

There you go "some" of the value. So either the store or the manufacturer eats the rest of the lost value, in either case the person using the policy at face value is taking value. In a lot of cases taking value would be stealing, but this is one of those cases where there's only a social contract and a set of norms that guard it and it's not seen as such. Think of a complementary offering of some kind based on an honor system, some treat or trinket in a bowl. Sure you can take just one or take them all. If you take them all you can argue that they're free but you're still a that guy that helps bring about a tragedy of the commons.

Culturally in the states and Latin America that makes you jerk and people will hate you for it. So there is social pressure in place to help regulate those events, but it may not always be the case everywhere.

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