Free Returns Are Complicated, Laborious, and Gross

This paragraph from the article is also blatantly untrue in the context of Amazon:

>We can dispense now with a common myth of modern shopping: The stuff you return probably isn’t restocked and sent back out to another hopeful owner

No, that's not really what happens: it's one of the biggest bugbears of third party Amazon sellers that FBA workers are biased towards restocking even damaged or dirty products. It creates problems for third party seller performance metrics and also issues for customers. The seller is blamed when a customer complains about such a damaged product. When possible most professional sellers prefer to process their own returns so that they can discard or repackage items that have been damaged.

Some of the statistics in the article also conflate the situation with apparel, in which huge proportions of likely returns must be factored in, with other categories in which return rates are really quite low. This is something that all sellers will know like the back of their hands because their return rates are in their dashboards and have to be planned for in all business metrics.

Furthermore, at least with Amazon, few items are "destroyed" even when they are slated to be destroyed. They are often resold on pallets to other sellers or directly to customers through Warehouse Deals. This causes problems when, say, items that have been alleged to be counterfeit are slated for "destruction" but instead wind up recirculated through Warehouse Deals or to liquidation sellers.

This paragraph touches on it without going into the full implications:

>This is why it’s difficult to accurately estimate what portion of returned merchandise is discarded, or even how much waste it adds up to, though we do know that billions of pounds of returns are thrown away in the U.S. every year. Joel Rampoldt, a managing director at the consulting firm AlixPartners, told me that most people in the industry believe that about 25 percent of returns are discarded, although the proportion varies widely depending on the product (clothing tends to be easier to resell than electronics that may contain user data, for example).

Even electronics slated for recycling or destruction often instead are sold to refurbishers. There's less waste than you might think when it's possible for actual junk to be resold as refurbished. The reason why it's not necessarily tracked is that the e-waste processing plant is not going to report to research firms about all the refurbishers that they sell to, even though there are pretty well built up electronics refurbishing certification organizations that promote the practice.

Not all journalists are bad: I've been a source (directly quoted and on background) on topics like this for the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Verge, Bloomberg, and others and have sometimes been pleasantly surprised by the amount of work and thought that the journalist did. Quality of articles has very little to do with the brand of the publication and everything to do with the quality of the individuals involved in writing the article. In this I think she picked mostly good sources and touched on some of the major themes, but a lack of familiarity with the industry undermined her ability to synthesize all the information.

It seems like she kind of came into it with the preconceived notion that returns are bad for the environment, and then assembled a bunch of information that neither fully supported nor fully undermined that preconception.

What's also missing from this article is that free returns are essential for establishing customer trust in ecommerce before purchases are made. People are more confident to make the purchase when they know they can return it. They are just much more circumspect with their money when they can't return it. The cost of processing returns is lower than the cost of liquidation and restocking with new product, so that is why the practice has become particularly more prevalent with online retail.

That's what'd be challenging to measure. It's really an issue in which returns result in maybe 12.5% junk, 12.5% resalable, versus a situation in which maybe 60% of the stuff on the shelf would have to be liquidated because customers were more circumspect with making a purchase in the first place. Stopping returns in the name of the environment could easily have the unintended consequence of resulting in more discarded new products due to lack of customer confidence.

The visual of determining if something is clean, or just a pile of usable goods going to waste can trigger disgust across the ideological spectrum. Although, I do agree that usage of "problematic" has become annoyingly problematic.

It is remarkably egregious

The one that has always frustrated me is “valid,” which has mutated from a word to acknowledge something’s objective recognition under a well-recognised schema to one that simply signals that it matches the speaker’s viewpoint.

Not that I have any issue with people believing whatever they want to, but using a word associated with objectivity to lend your inherently subjective statement of opinion a false imprimatur of hard truth is certainly disingenuous.

Some jobs are just gross. Plumbing. Cleaning school bathrooms. Pest control. Embalming. Urology.

Unless we never want our trash picked up, some folks are gonna have to work gross jobs.

What I find interesting and perhaps "problematic" is that these gross jobs do not always pay well.

was it one of those wierd things where a single article page actually lets you choose between multiple "versions", some of which can be radically different? i hate those, they should have limited them to colours and sizes

In this case, the solution is to buy from a retailer whose website isn't a "total mess".

You could also, you know, close the page and buy the screen somewhere that strikes more confidence in you.

I personally view conflicting information like that as a red flag. I would rather pass up a potential good deal than have to navigate a return from a questionable listing (or more likely, suffer with a bad product because I would blame myself for buying it).

Only Apollo 8, 10, and 11 were flown on free return trajectories. Subsequent missions (quoting Wikipedia)

> used a hybrid trajectory that launched to a highly elliptical Earth orbit that fell short of the Moon with effectively a free return to the atmospheric entry corridor. They then performed a mid-course maneuver to change to a trans-Lunar trajectory that was not a free return.[5] This retained the safety characteristics of being on a free return upon launch and only departed from free return once the systems were checked out and the lunar module was docked with the command module, providing back-up maneuver capabilities. In fact, within hours after the accident, Apollo 13 used the lunar module to maneuver from its planned trajectory to a circumlunar free-return trajectory. Apollo 13 was the only Apollo mission to actually turn around the Moon in a free-return trajectory (however, two hours after perilune, propulsion was applied to speed the return to Earth by 10 hours and move the landing spot from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-return_trajectory

Exactly. For clothing and shoes free returns are a way to make the purchase safe for customers (and thus to make them actually order) who may be reluctant to order something that they don't know whether it will fit.

You mean manufacturers?

Sizing for people is complicated. Even if you get fitted by a tailor there's often some adjustment of the final product.

Maybe there could be more customization that doesn't require personal service, but people probably don't want to pay for semi-custom by and large just like most people don't pay to have tailored clothing. Just standardizing sizes by itself isn't sufficient because it's been well-researched that people are not "average" across many dimensions.

Certainly cheaper for Amazon. It seems limited to 'cheap' items like books and such though.

In many cases requiring that the item actually be returned is to prevent fraud.

For some cheap items I think Amazon concluded that the benefits in terms of costs to them and of customer satisfaction outweigh the risk and cost of fraud. I'm also sure that they have extensive data on their customers.

That once happened to me when I bought a fancy glass sconce for the exterior of my house. It arrived smashed, and the representative from Amazon politely asked me if I could safely discard it. He mentioned that he didn't want anyone else to get cut when opening the package.

I happily closed the box up and put it in my trashcan, then ordered another.

My roommate once got pretty lucky with this, in that he was accidentally sent a big projector screen that he in no way ordered. Being an oversize/awkward item it was easier to Amazon to say "eh keep it w/e" than pay for it to be shipped back.

Why would you pay $65 for a used pair of outdoor hiking pants when you can get new pants cheaper? Talk about gross.

I'm pretty sure that this sort of semi-custom clothing concept has been around since at least the dot-com era but it's never taken off. I suspect that it's some combination of people not willing to pay the premium and, loosely, fashion--i.e. most people aren't interested in just having a small number of perfectly fitting articles of clothing.

Is that different from the deep discount stores like Big Lots mentioned in the article?

There are companies that buy up returns and resell them, but I don't get the impression that these make up any significant part of that chain. Unsold lots from liquidations or just unsold remainders from large retailers: sure, those can be sold without too much hassle. But the heart of the matter seems to be that returned items will apparently quite quickly cost more than their worth to handle for eventual resale, and just shredding them (and not spend any time at all beyond unpacking, registering, and then dumping it in a bin) is cheaper. The only exceptions seem to be high-end items where a limited investment can make them suitable for resale as a discounted refurbished item, and even then there are reports of brand new televisions and tablets just ending up in a landfill¹.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jul/23/charities-c...

If much of the stuff on the ships is not going to be used much, then eventually the stuff that is used will have higher prices and will therefore get priority on the ships. Moreover, if as you say much of this stuff is not important, then we're simply rolling in opulence and are simply complaining about luxuries getting to us a bit late.

Are you sure online shopping is killing the planet faster?

Whatever they're wasting in returns, they're saving something in reducing the need for physical stores.

I didn't see anything in the way of the discussion of these tradeoffs,

but physical locations for big box stores certainly aren't environmentally free.