Stores weigh paying you not to bring back unwanted items
cnn.com
cnn.com
That's for the same reason. The way books are sold works like this:
1. The publisher prints a whole pile of them.
2. Booksellers order a bunch. Because both publisher and bookseller want to maximize sales and avoid turning away a customer because they don't have enough copies of the book, the bookseller orders more than they expect to sell.
3. Once the sales have tapered off, the bookseller is stuck with unsold merchandise. They could send them back to the publisher, but the last thing in the world the publisher wants is more copies of a product they themselves can mass manufacture. So, instead, the bookseller just destroys them and tells the publisher how many weren't sold so they can be refunded.
4. Of course, a nefarious bookshop could simply claim that the books were unsold and then get to sell books that they didn't pay for and pocket the profit. To prevent that, the publisher requires them to cut the covers off and ship those back. Shipping just the covers is much cheaper than shipping the entire book and serves to ensure that every book was indeed not sold. Then the bookseller trashes the rest of the book.
5. Of course, this scheme only works if the bookseller can't sell a coverless book. So the publisher prints the warning inside the book to remind customers not to buy them like that.
Having just done a quick check, I'm surprised there's not!
I guess I'm not such a voracious reader that I'm buying in bulk like that.
But the publisher's warning also verifies that it's a bona fide copy.
Just imagining...
Dear downloader: please make sure the file with the sha1 hash fingerprint "34973274" is accompanied with a physical copy of our famous hologram logo sticker. If you don't have the sticker then STOP-- do not open the program to view the contents.
This is the most common supply-demand and stocking problem across all industries. Surely you don’t think it’s as simple as that?
Good question!
My understanding is that that's how it used to work. Booksellers would buy as many as they wanted and sales were final as far as the publisher was concerned. It was on the bookseller to make sure they didn't buy too many.
During the Great Depression, bookstores were hit very hard and they didn't buy much. That in turn hit publishers. In order to incentivize bookstores to buy more copies, a couple of the larger publishers began to offer this deal where they would allow returning unsold copies. Booksellers loved it, obviously, since it greatly reduced their risk. Once a couple of publishers did this, the rest were basically pressured to follow since the booksellers so strongly prefered publishers who did.
Once booksellers got used to this deal, it became entrenched and now publishers are essentially stuck with it.
They had remaindered or unsold books, covers intact, usually of an academic nature. But that also included O'Reilly books, and I got several large "coffee table" books of glossy photographs that would usually be £50 but reduced to £2 due to cosmetic damage to the slip cover.
I think there was only a single new book store in our town growing up. The grocery store or school book fairs were the only other places to buy books.
In France, from my understanding, there is "Les retours" ("The returns"), a system where libraries have one year to send unsold books backs, then the distributor usually dispatch them to their libraries or as a stock for online sales.
Strangely, I don't to the mistake when going from English to french. Because I'm more used translating "software library" to "bibliothèque logicielle" than talking about book stores in English.
Guess I'll need to pay more attention to it.
what they wanted is just a bag of bar codes then the retailers dump them anywhere they please. it's one thing I'm happy to see die out, the cost of printing and shipping then just dumping is a very wasteful endeavour just to incite further insecurities in their audiences (mostly) so they can advertise more products. Doing it online is much more efficient.
An important part of a product is its standard, fungible nature. Every unit off the production line the same. Quality maintained. Sealed in packaging.
As soon as you take it out of the packaging it becomes a unique item with a history. It's outside the QA bubble. It might be in perfectly saleable condition; it might have something wrong with it (after all, there's a reason it's being returned); it might have been damaged by the customer. It's a liability. If they were to take it back and re-sell it to someone, and get sued, that would wipe out more value than throwing away hundreds or even thousands of the same good.
This is also why secondhand goods in general are so cheap, and things like furniture may even have negative net value because they cost more to move than they are worth.
But there is that new category of things with too little actual value to be worth processing like pillows and compressed mattresses (once you allow them to expand, you cannot compress them at home.)
But a lot if the problem in returnable objects where a return is not cost effective has to do with shipping costs. Shipping it back + processing costs cuts into profits and the resale value does not compensate adequately. Fortunately for them, the "returns" ratio don't negate overall profits.
That said, when it makes sense to me, I will buy from Amazon's warehouse deals --there are some good deals to be had.
They had no use for a second mattress, so that’s how we got a free, brand-new very fancy king-sized mattress with minor cosmetic damage!
> This is also why secondhand goods in general are so cheap, and things like furniture may even have negative net value because they cost more to move than they are worth.
On the German equivalent to Craigs' List - Ebay Kleinanzeigen - IKEA furniture is much easier to sell than other furniture, even though IKEA furniture is cheap and quality is only "good enough". The reason, I think, is that used IKEA furniture comes closest to still being a standardized item. You can easily look up the dimensions online, you may already have or know the exact same item, you know what to enter into the search field [of Ebay Kleinanzeigen]. The overall buying experience might even be better than going to the IKEA store, as the furniture is already assembled and potentially closer to your home.
https://www.ikea.com/es/en/customer-service/services/buy-bac...
That sounds more like an argument for tort reform to stiff plaintiffs with inane complaints about refurbished/restocked items.
They must have some ROI calculation. Or would that be ROR (return on return?)
Noyce!
My grandpa passed away recently and stuff he had spent over a million dollars over the years to accumulate over the years sold only for $30k. I realized that most of the value in selling a product in keeping it organized on a shelf, and marketing to consumers that you are a place where someone can buy a product of that type.
But your POV is more interesting.
A guy I used to work/hobby with could tell you which factory a Mustang was built in, and though in my era (1990s) the markings had all been gone, it is said that he and others could even tell you the name of the guy who assembled certain parts by the markings or other inconsistencies. When restoring a Mustang, these details (e.g. built by Mario in Dearborn in early 1967) are replicated by a good restorer. I believe that Jaguar also has affectionados who know the cars to that level of detail.
Instead we should be forcing stores to not only always accept unwanted items, if anything to encourage them to exercise more care preventing low-quality/counterfeit/misrepresented products. But to also be at least partially responsible for the total waste/recycling burden their sales create.
> Whenever someone hands me a flyer, it's kind of like they're saying "here, you throw this away." - Mitch Hedberg
Every time people rant (rightfully!) about corporations are bad, I think of any experience I had in retail and realize sure but people are assholes too :-D
What it was to prevent was lifetime free warranty and upgrades. Buy a laptop, use it for 3 years, come back and say "I don't like it anymore.", get your money back, buy new laptop with upgraded specs... repeat.
And before you think this is theoretical, when I worked there we had a guy return a TV. It was a ~7 year old rear-projection TV that was bought before the 90 day policy was implemented. It had died well out of warranty.
So he returned it, got his ~$4k back, walked out on the floor and grabbed a $2k LCD and went home with a brand new LCD TV and $2k in his pocket in exchange for his 7 year old broken TV.
How was this policy not abused to the point of killing the company ?
I saw this happen first-hand while I was waiting in line to renew my membership. There was a man in front of me in line who from what I overheard of his conversation with the manager was returning something like his 5th tv in a year. The manager gave him his refund and then rescinded his membership and had the man walked out of the store.
If Samsung, etc didn't like it, Costco would drop them as a vendor real fast. So the merchants would eat it. Apparently it got bad enough that they stopped eating it.
Europe farmer’s protest: https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=manure+protest
> sweatshop level of insanity
Turkers: https://www.vocativ.com/410794/are-virtual-sweatshops-the-fu...
> capitalist duty
toil? profit? consume? capitalist heteropatriarchal citizen’s duty to literally produce people? work while experiencing pleasure?
> consume people
Accept Cannibal diversity today
> planet be damned
Worship beastly numbers
We've optimized standardized manufacturing to incredible levels, while any kind of "exception handling" is much harder to optimize, and thus becomes more expensive relative to manufacturing.
A return isn't equivalent to the original item. A return is an item of unknown quality/status that requires manual handling to be turned into a known, sellable item, unless you want to sell boxes full of rocks as new items. The cheaper making a new item is, the less worth it is to deal with the exceptions.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. If re-making is less resource intensive (human labor is also a resource) than the alternative, then re-making is often the right choice.
Repairing is also waste: It often involves inefficient one-off shipping and handling of spare parts, and is a massive sink for human effort.
Just to make it clear, these were battery-powered card readers (VP3300's [0]) that were still in their boxes with the original cords. I was shocked they wanted me to just throw them away. They are also very small and the box that held them all wasn't big or heavy.
[0] https://idtechproducts.com/products/mobile-payment-solutions...
Why not just sell discounted "non-returnable" versions of products, the same as you can buy discounted non-refundable airline tickets?
America's "everything is returnable" culture is a bit odd, obviously intended to encourage mindless consumption, but comes at a cost... You are paying extra for everything since the cost of return losses is built into the price - you are paying "return insurance" whether you need it or not.
The whole point of the warranty is that the company is claiming the product will work for x days. If you start letting people sell things without a warranty they'll make products that last 0 days but advertise well.
I'm talking about the fact that in America you can return pretty much anything, without having any reason. Don't want that party dress after you've worn it to the party? Return it! Don't want the big screen TV after your Super Bowl party? Return it! Can't profit from your stockpile of covid-shortage toilet paper? Return that too!
Except that Costco comes incredibly close to that. I've seen them accept returns for things I would never have imagined anyone accepting.
Maybe good publicity, I suppose.
S/M/L often requires simply guessing
Until recently, where I have been trying to order a pair of Teva sandals (I live far away from standard stores for purchasing brand name items, and often don't do it except for shoes, beds, office chairs, etc), and I got the size that compared to 28 CM. Too big. Go down a size. Still too big. 25 CM in Teva is officially 28 CM everywhere else. Why the inconsistency?
I used to wear a 36 or 38 waist pants. I've managed to get that down to a 30, but I'm back up to a 32. I've also been buying Levi's jeans with some elastic in them, so maybe I've gone back up more, but I'm willing to lie to myself and say I'm still a 32.
However, I did also recently chat to a acquihire of Zalando who are building a Computer Vision-based app to scan (near-naked) photographs of customers to provide a 3D model to approximate fit of clothes.
Which does seem the fix to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place, but companies are more willing to through elaborate tech at it than just fix the original issue (cf. carbon capture). Very very frustrating.
I've heard this before but it always confuses me. Stores always charge the amount such that (price per widget)*(expected number of widgets sold) is maximized.
Put another way - If stores somehow managed to eliminated returns with no other side effects, would you expect the price to drop?
I don't believe that the world operates under such a system, but in theory it works that way.
Retail is a near perfect example of multiple sellers competing for multiple buyers resulting in razor thin profit margins, which means the buyers are getting what they want at the lowest prices possible.
Retail business do not earn 2-4% profit margins because they want to, they earn them because their customers will go to the store next door if they try to take 5%+.
The point is competition does cause each other to up their offerings and/or lower prices to maintain market share.
Have you seen Home Depot's and Lowe's profit margins? Consistently 5-9% for decades. Kroger, Walmart, and target all earn 1-3%. They hardly ever earn 4% nowadays. Perhaps after all of the cashiers and stockers are automated or made redundant. They are all heavily investing in automation, delivery, pickup, and supply chain tech.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/HD/home-depot/prof...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/LOW/lowes/profit-m...
The logistics of selling the things Home Depot and Lowes sells is much harder to replicate than Target/Walmart/grocery retail, so the profit margins need to get bigger before a competitor will want to invest in the market due to the higher risks.
The error is in neglecting the stores’ competitors selling the widget for a lower price, and customers opting to buy from said competitors.
Who's doing the best job in maximizing profit - the gas station selling lots of gas at $2/gal, or the one across the road selling far less at $2.50/gal? (I don't know, but surely one is doing better than the other!).
In other countries where "no reason" returns are not the norm, are stores missing out on profit they could be making by adopting this policy and adjusting prices accordingly, or is it the American stores that have it wrong?
If all stores in unison dropped no-reason returns then there's be no competitive reason to drop prices, but if only one or a few did it then presumably they'd have to (else why pay same price for less flexibility). More to the point, they might WANT to drop prices as a result of this reduced cost-of-goods since that'd be a way to attract more customers, as non-stop "10% off" sales attest.
They do. It's called a final sale. Clothing retailers do this frequently. Some are more strict on this than others. Bonobos, for example, often advertises as final but will accept returns (YMMV basis).
What I'm curious about is sizing. Buy three pairs of the same size pants from Banana Republic and you'll get three pairs that fit differently. Their deviation is sometimes extreme. Same with Levis and others. You would think, in an online shopping world, that this would be the lowest of hanging fruit. I can't believe the cost of QA is greater than the costs of returns and reputational harm. Shopping online for clothes is just madness, and it's common to buy multiple items of the same size (or next size S and M) just to be able to return the ones that don't fit. Sometimes you may fit in S and an M from the same brand. Just different SKU/factory/batch. It's a total crapshoot.
BTW, Mr. Porter has a fantastic return process. They include the return label and invoice in the box. Some of their stuff is expensive, but I'm much more comfortable trying their products out because it's so easy to return.
Some high end tailored clothes even sells you the entire bolt of cloth in case you want to match it later, because everything the same the bolts will vary slightly over time.
This is also why so much clothes now is stretchy.
I don't see how allowing consumers to get first-hand experience with a product before being forced to stick with it causes their consumption to be "mindless". It allows them to make choices that are more informed.
Surely you don't think stores have these policies for your benefit - to allow you to be a more informed consumer?! They have these policies because it results in them selling more stuff, because they are lowering the level of commitment needed for consumers to buy.
> It encourages mindless consumption because it lowers the level of commitment needed. Not sure if you really want it, or should be buying it?
How is having more information about a product from first-hand experience somehow more mindless than buying a thing sight unseen?
> return it if you change your mind.
Yes, exactly. You can use your mind to decide if you want the product. That's the opposite of mindless.
> Surely you don't think stores have these policies for your benefit - to allow you to be a more informed consumer?!
I know this might seem totally crazy to you but, yes, in most transactions both the buyer and seller end up satisfied. That's why people buy and sell things. When I sell a thing, it's worth less to me than it is to the buyer. When I buy a thing, it's worth more to me than it is to the seller.
Obviously, buyers and sellers are trying to get the best preferential deal for themselves, but it is not a zero-sum game. You are currently surrounded by products most of which you probably purchased. Surely you don't believe you got actively fucked over on every single one of those do you?
> They have these policies because it results in them selling more stuff, because they are lowering the level of commitment needed for consumers to buy.
Yes. And to the degree that having things can benefit anyone's life, that is good for consumers too. Sure, we could also just not buy stuff. Sit on a bare patch of dirt. But sometimes stuff makes our life better.
I bought a synthesizer recently. It's really hard to predict if a musical instrument will gel with you, since it's complex, interactive, and the sounds that resonate with someone are deeply personal. Also, they're often quite expensive. Sometimes you can try one in a store, but even that doesn't always help since it can be difficult to really explore the sounds in a crowded shop.
I was OK with ordering it online because I knew if it didn't work for me, I could return it. The alternative would have been not buying it. It was too expensive to commit to being stuck with it without any first-hand experience. And, sure, I could definitely get by without it. It's not like I need it to live. But in this case, it turns out that I like it. It's enriched my life to have it, and I wouldn't if the store didn't allow returns. I benefitted from that policy.
No, I'm really not. These are my actual opinions.
> Yes, exactly. You can use your mind to decide if you want the product. That's the opposite of mindless.
So who's trying overly hard to support their POV now ? ;-)
> I bought a synthesizer recently
For sure there's consumer benefit to the "everything is returnable" norm, especially in cases like this where it's hard to know if something matches your needs without actually trying it. No doubt it also sometimes works the other way and folk are encouraged to buy stuff they don't need, then never end up returning it so just waste their money.
Of course retail is a generally a win-win, but that doesn't mean the retailer doesn't have their own best interests at heart. They use the "everything is returnable" policy because at end of the day it generates them more profit. They wouldn't be extending you this "try before you buy" benefit if it was actually costing them more than not doing so (unless competitive pressure forced them to).
I understand that "mindless consumption" is not how most people would be happy to describe their shopping behavior, nor is it a good description of everyone, but nonetheless it's hard to come up with a more broadly accurate and concise description of why stores do this to increase sales. Even in your synth case (where try-before-you-buy is plenty justifiable) it essentially fits ... you made the purchase because the store removed any worries you had about whether it was the right decision or not.
No, I still have all of those worries. I still have to pay for the thing after all, so the consequences are entirely the same. The only difference is how much information I have at the point that I have to make that decision.
If I can return it, then I have first-hand experience before I decide to commit to the purchase. If I can't return it, I have to commit with less knowledge.
Hardly. If you can return it you get your money back, else not, so the financial consequences of able-to-return or not are 100% different.
> I was OK with ordering it online because I knew if it didn't work for me, I could return it. The alternative would have been not buying it. It was too expensive to commit to being stuck with it without any first-hand experience.
Yeah, exactly.
Online retailers often do just that. You may see a retailer have a section called "final sale" or "last call" for discounted, non-returnable merchandise. Others simply offload the merchandise onto EBay.
I have bought things that way, but often I have regretted it. In general it is hard to evaluate online goods before purchase, and if something ends up on "final sale" it probably wasn't selling well to begin with for a good reason.
Not sure how this is unique to America. EU countries have much stronger "return" laws and consumer protection laws that theoretically encourage even more of what you're implying.
But there is no EU consumer right to simply return an item because you've decided you don't like it, or no longer want it, which are open to abuse.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
> If you bought a product or a service online ... you also have the right to cancel and return your order within 14 days, for any reason and without a justification.
I do remember the cringe factor in hearing that my mother had once convinced (against normal policy) a UK retailer to take back some clothing item she had simply changed her mind on! It'd be like ordering a steak at a restaurant then sending it back because "I changed my mind - I'd like the chicken".
As others have noted, there's a difference between consumer protection laws supporting return of faulty goods, and this ability to return stuff because you no longer want it (and may have even used it!).
Because the feeling of security the return policy gives customers makes it much more likely that they'll buy something. Most of the time, people buy things because they want them, so they won't return them even if they can.
From a customer's perspective, having the return option is preferable to not having the return option. From a store's perspective, 150 customers buying the product and 5 of them returning it is likely preferable to 100 customers buying the product and 0 returning it.
Additionally, forcing people to make an additional decision (whether to buy return insurance) is a great way to cause analysis paralysis and sell 50 instead of 150.
I think part of it is also that retail mark-ups are typically huge, so the loss on a few returns, even if thrown in the trash, vs the extra profit on a few more sales, skews heavily towards encouraging the extra sales.
Still, as someone who never returns non-defective stuff, it'd be nice not to have to subsidize those that do!
A few days ago I took a plane and more than half the flights were cancelled that day, supposedly because of the hiring crisis. Yet there are a record number of people travelling! These people booked their flights months ago! Why did the company not hire more people? Why did they not simplify the hiring process? Why did they not adjust the wages accounting for the labor shortage?
As a personal example, my field went WFH and so I just left it because I like in person interactions. That's ten or more years of training gone.
You can argue about whether in that specific case perhaps someone on the other side of the world can replace me, but in the abstract, you can't just change everything (e.g. fire everyone at the airline and attempt to rehire) and expect to be 100% back to normal just because you want to be.
People moved city, bought pets, marriages broke, etc. Things changed.
These are the same problem. Matching allocation to demand is a hard problem and the wild swings in demand caused by COVID and inflation responses means that you have both supply chain problems and surplus problems.
Things aren't very elastic and money-saving just-in-time practices of eliminating buffers mean that it is harder to respond to the various shocks.
You're essentially upset that the future wasn't predicted correctly when there has been a lot of uncertainty going around for years now.
Because of the uncertainty you have both large overestimations and underestimations.
Covid, alas, did not do them the favor of agreeing to their belief system and is still around. And so now they have a large number of people sick, and a large number of employees upset that their health is sacrificed for corporate profits.
As for "why don't they just hire more", pilots don't grow on trees. A commercial licenses requires 1500 flight hours, spread out over at least two years. And (again, because it was cheap), airlines outsourced that cost to pilots. Same as all other education efforts. So, on the pilot side, addressing a shortage takes at least two years and requires finding a bunch of people willing to sink time and money into a license - while simultaneously the airline companies have sent a clear signal they don't care about their employees.
"The market" can't fix those issues. Not in the short term, and with the trust lost, not even in the mid term.
So why didn't airline cancel those flights? One, if you pretend the situation is different from reality, the pain of cognitive dissonance makes you buy into your own lies. Two, even if you resist that force, as a publicly traded company, cancelling thousand of flights in advance is a hit on your stock price. If you wait until the last moment, maybe something changes, or you might make it at least past bonus day.
Ultimately, the market has adapted. It just has adapted to maximizing executive pay.
Additionally, it didn’t used to take that long to get a pilot’s license. Before 2013 you could obtain a license in 250 hours. This changed due to a law passed by congress that increased flight training time to 1500 hours in reaction to a commercial accident that occurred in 2009. The irony? The pilots of that crash both had far more than 1500 hours of experience. It was a sympathy play.
Short-term profits and poor regulatory strategy led to this.
This sounds a bit dubious. A pilot's license or a commercial pilot's license?
Source: https://www.travelweekly.com/Robert-Silk/How-1500-hour-rule-...
Different times and different things. There can be a surplus of T-shirts from Vietnam and a shortage of 90nm PMICs at the same time. There can be a shortage of stuff in December due to port problems, but an oversupply of that (out of date) stuff in February. Not to mention the drop in real income and a large drop in goods spending as aggregate spending shifts again back to services like air travel.
> Why did they not adjust the wages accounting for the labor shortage?
There are far more jobs than people to hire, at present there are guaranteed to not be enough people somewhere. That will be wherever has the least capacity to pay more - and airlines are notable for being extremely low margin.
The supply chain crisis doesn't mean nothing is being supplied. It means that there are unknowable delays in everything. Your order may be made on time or delayed for several months. Once it's on a boat, it make take two weeks or four weeks to get across the Pacific, but then it might be unloaded right away or stuck on the boat for months. Once off the boat, it could be stuck at the port for a week or get transfered to a truck or rail right away.
When faced with all that uncertainty, you're going to have times where things start moving and too much stuff shows up at once. As well as times where you don't have much to sell.
I like to think that international flights are last on the chopping block, but I haven't done anything to verify if that's true at all.
Repeat as many times as necessary
Training pilots takes time. Even with an aggressive hiring ramp-up, the new crop probably wouldn't be trained in time for today. Perhaps for 2024's travel season.
COVID dramatically reduced worker demand for airlines, hotels, restaurants, the like. So those people went to do something else, something that saw an increase in demand, say delivering packages.
Now those workers are needed again, but no longer available. Or only a few.
As an example, at Schiphol airport (Amsterdam) they require 500 new/extra security staff. It takes months to find them and just training takes several weeks.
It isn't so much a "hiring crisis" as "intentional early retirement is business as usual". Airlines received billions of dollars from Congress to encourage them not to lay off workers during 2020. They took the money and used some of it as early retirement bonuses for pilots and other employees. [0][1][2] They knew they wouldn't have enough personnel to fly many of the flights they scheduled, but tickets are paid in advance and free loans from would-be customers are good for executive bonuses. Now they're blaming "weather", when the sun beats down with not a cloud in the sky, so they don't have to help passengers pay for hotels and alternate flights. If there were anyone home at DoT there would be major fines to pay, but they know that CIA Pete isn't going to do anything to annoy donors. [3]
[0] https://simpleflying.com/southwest-early-retirement-package/
[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2020/04/30/3900...
[2] https://simpleflying.com/us-airline-layoffs-early-retirement...
[3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/06/airline-delays-are-i...
He has developed a keen sense in finding the profitable jewels. For example, women's cosmetics. They are unused (damaged boxes and such), he buys them up < 10% of the retail price then puts them up at 90% retail price on his own website.
Women are spamming him to death. When do you have the cheap "item X" again?
It should be said though that it's a very laborious business model. He needs to quality check, inventorize, publish, tax report, etc on a huge amount of items. He has a "no return" policy. Which is actually illegal here (Netherlands), but he seems to get away with it as nobody bothers with a 5$ item.
If you're interested in unpacking, without buying pallets of stuff, theres a small trend by YouTube influencers buying a pallet or two and looking whats inside.
> buys them up < 10% of the retail price then puts them up at 90% retail price
In other words, the labor he puts in is worth the 80% of retail price. Or seen differently, he's a business that uses labor to turn a worthless pile of mixed products of questionable usefulness into sellable product.
(though, it's naturally cheap to send things in bulk because sea shipping is very efficient.)
That's a smart approach. Make it the consumers choice.
I would make the modification of allowing buyers to list the stuff they don't want right back on the site and ship it consumer-to-consumer.
I once got three bags of someone else’s shopping and they were “It’s yours now.”
In my opinion, the onus is on you to do your due diligence when it comes to researching the correct product. Bought an HDMI cable instead of DisplayPort? You should have looked. Microwave doesn’t fit your space? Measuring tapes (and AR tools[0]) exist for a reason. Pants are too large? Use the damn fitting room[1] before buying them!
Of course, all three of those items are resalable after a return, but stores would most likely send 2/3 to be destroyed instead of refurbishment.
I just wish we could move away from the “customer is always right” deplorable tactics which create umpteen amounts of waste. Such as my coworker, who bought 10 dresses for a wedding and returned 9 of them after a test drive.
[0]: https://size.link [1]: I get it, fitting rooms were closed during COVID. It doesn’t excuse the waste though (just shifts the blame).
Because it's a competitive market. Once your competitors offer something like a generous return policy you might need to do the same.
But also, I don't find this argument particularly compelling. "It is how it is. It can never be any other way. Because all the things that make it how it is won't let it."
As to why retailers do it, I think it's a combination of:
a. Regulations - many jurisdictions have a requirement that retailers accept returns for some period. This is great because it makes fraud on the retailer's part extremely unprofitable - customers can just return fraudulently marketed products.
b. Competition - one thing that both Walmart and Amazon did was lower the bar for returns. In the 90s Walmart would often accept returns even without a receipt, which was a competitive advantage against other retailers that had more restrictive policies. Amazon did something similar for online retail by paying for shipping of returned items.
c. Encouraging impulse buys - Having a high bar for researching purchases means that impulse buys are much less likely. If you're in a store and you see a microwave you really like, knowing that you can return it makes it more likely you will buy it right then and there. If you have to go home and confirm a bunch of dimensions, it's more likely you won't return for the microwave as emotions will have cooled.
Edit: Addressing fashion specifically. There are many factors that can make something that works in a fitting room turn out to later be ill suited.
First, it's not uncommon to be buying a top or pants to go with other clothing in one's wardrobe. Unless you bring all that stuff with you when you go shopping, it's only possible to guess whether things will work out while in a fitting room. There's also a level of wishful thinking that can happen when trying on clothes - where you make it fit by sucking in your gut or something that can mask the fact that clothing won't work. Long term comfort is also impossible to ascertain in a fitting room. This is especially applicable to shoes - where they might be comfy for the 5 minutes in the store, but start to hurt after 30 minutes to an hour.
Finally, it's impossible to tell how much something will shrink in the wash when you buy it. Some stuff that fits perfectly "off the rack" will no longer fit properly after it has been through the washer/dryer.
I once ordered a custom aquarium. 200+ gallons, over 400 pounds of glass. The sizes were standard, custom part was for drilled holes for plumbing. The manufacturer advertised the aquarium as X inches by Y inches foot print. I built a stand for that size, but it turns out the manufacturer was half an inch off in each direction.
I couldn't return the aquarium since it had been made custom, but the manufacturer delivered me a product I couldn't use with the stand I built. The stands have to be built very specifically to transfer weight to the floor. Filled, the aquarium was over 3000 pounds, being off by half an inch was catastrophic. I had to tear apart the stand I built and rebuild it to support it.
Manufacturers can be wrong, manufacturers can lie. A microwave might fit your cabinet on a spec sheet, but not when it's delivered. Or something else might make it a poor fit (i.e., it fits, but requires clearance you don't have for the door hinge to swing).
Let customers return things.
they still gave you the wrong product, you could require them to at least fulfill the contract.
1. There's vanity sizing going on (e.g. 30" pants actually have a 32" waist due to vanity-sizing) and measurements provided may not be consistent throughout batches. These are still handmade items, just not artisanal.
2. Fabric drapes differently, so what looks good on a model shots with the clothing meticulously pinned, may look different when you actually wear it.
Also, I assume another reason for a lax return policy is that the margins are large enough to support it. Or retailers expect that most customers won't take advantage of it (until they do, like REI).
It's a shame there can't be standard sizing. All this confusion just because we don't want to offend the overweight and obese.
The worst offenders I have known about vanity sizing have generally been fairly small. My grandmother, for example, was without doubt a size 6 but would never buy anything that wasn't listed as a size 4. I have had two girlfriends who were similarly annoying--the clothing I bought them was clearly dead-on the correct size when they tried it on, but they wouldn't wear it because it was a size "too large" (they didn't last long as girlfriends).
By contrast, the smallest and largest women I have known simply wanted something that fit correctly regardless of the "labeled size".
Buying something feels less risky if you believe you have recourse if it doesn't work out. Practically speaking, if a company can raise sales by 20% with a liberal return policy but 5% of purchases are actually returned, they may still come out ahead.
Long-term, having a return policy also signals that the company is interested in taking care of the customer and building a relationship. This is why you see brands like REI building a reputation on top of their generous return policy. People (on average, not everyone of course) will actually pay a small premium to shop from a company with a return policy.
Some examples are ambiguous (or missing!) info in a description, details or measurements that are slightly (or very) inaccurate, quality that is unacceptable but difficult to differentiate online (often because aggressively positive marketing), etc, etc.
If these weren't balanced out with liberal return policies, then I wouldn't buy nearly as much online. Literally anything over a few dozen dollars would start being suspect for me. I think this is also the case for many other people. Really, until Amazon started their incredibly pro-consumer policies and other venues followed suite, I really didn't purchase much online.
If items are going to go unused, it makes economic sense for them to be sold on the secondary market. If they are going to be sold, it makes economic sense that they be sold by an entity that is good at selling them. The original merchant has a significant comparative advantage in selling items it already sells compared to any given consumer.
I once bought 3 identically labeled pairs of levis jeans. I tried one pair on, they fit fine.
The other 2 pairs fit dramatically different. Same size, same style, but apparently quality control at the factory was dramatically off.
> Microwave doesn’t fit your space? Measuring tapes (and AR tools[0]) exist for a reason.
I've seen (bought) appliances with mislabeled dimensions. Half an inch, not much, but the door to the laundry room wouldn't shut.
Also things like hookup placements for hoses are often not labeled on the box. Love it when those stick out way past the main body of the machine.
Heck I bought some picture hooks from Home Depot where the included nails stuck out farther then the hooks did, making the entire product useless given the purpose of it was to distribute weight on a hook and not directly on a nail. (Impressive fail there...)
> Such as my coworker, who bought 10 dresses for a wedding and returned 9 of them after a test drive.
Having a "try at home" scheme is going to be an effective solution for this problem. Amazon does this for fashion items.
"What socks/shoes/bra/necklace/earring combos go with this" is not an easy question to answer w/o having a piece to try on at home. Heck just seeing how clothing looks in different lighting. Fitting rooms would benefit from adjustable color balances in their lighting, an outfit meant to be worn outside in the sun may look very different under a store's yellow or blue lighting.
> I just wish we could move away from the “customer is always right”
Some customers abuse the rules, but I'd best that most customers just want to buy a product that makes them happy. If stores are not doing a good job matching customers up to those products, then the stores need to adjust their sales strategy.
I'm guessing that me shipping that watch from Finland to the UK would've cost way too much.
I did have to ship in a broken Seagate HDD back to Amazon.de on their dime though, so it's not just them not wanting broken goods back. Although that might also be Seagate wanting it back for warranty purposes even though I went through Amazon?
What would be sneaky would be for UPS to sell Amazon things that look to the customer like a return label, but they just throw it in the trash without shipping it ...
2) bed bugs
Mattresses are big. They stand out when left on the side of the road.
Most of the SKUs they ordered are no longer eligible for prime delivery. This was several years ago.
The only other time this has happened for me was with some wine glasses; one out of the four in the package (single stock unit) was broken and they said I should keep the item. I guess in general they're not interested in receiving broken glass returns.
Whether it's glass or not, as soon as it's not resellable as the original product it becomes worse than worthless. There is no sane way for them to deal with a SKU of "3 glasses", total quantity: 1.
I ordered some batteries for portable two-way radios. Some of them arrived completely dead (zero volts; high impedance at the charging terminals) and sure enough they want them back even after I indicate they're bad.
...amazon warehouse on the other hand worked no questions asked despite questionable economics
That's the most important part of it. If people could figure out and trigger it intentionally, the whole model would break.
Now the consumer is the quality control department. There's no reason to make quality goods if you can cut costs to the point where you can afford to give refunds and eat the loss.
For myself, a free refund doesn't really solve the problem, since I value my time and often need something right away. I don't think it would work for industrial suppliers like McMaster-Carr and Digi-Key. I really can't afford to wait for a second or third try when I need a part and a project is being held up.
Similarly, really pursuing shoplifters who are dealing in the hundreds of dollars of physical goods just isn't worth it -- because a seemingly high enough number of customers aren't malicious and do pay the bill with no hassle.
It must be so if a 1-5 cent margins can translate to enough sales to cover writing off the merchandise grifters want to get a hold of as well as torching the stuff that slips past QA.
Walmart’s fraud dept looks much different than Nordstrom’s I would suspect, but both know their respective landscapes and successfully navigate them.
That's because the lettuce in the salad was supplied with so little margin that the $1/hour migrant workers harvesting it aren't given anywhere sensible to defecate.
One good thing about the coming of the Facebookverse is that USians then won't need to buy new clothes every week in the real world.
They just offered return shipping as a service to the customer. It was all smoke and mirrors in the first place. If return shipping cost more than selling to discounters or handling the trash they will just let you keep the goods.
The damage Amazon, Zara, Primark and the likes are doing to this world is gigantic. Destroying the environment, tearing down worker rights, using close to slave labour, shipping their trash to poor countries, wasting fuel and resources.
Only allow customers with high internal ratings to not bring back unwanted items. Customers with low trust could have their merchandise bid out to a third party that would deal with returns/inventory/etc.
Could this be the start of inflation going down?
Also, not allowed per multiple Credit Cards.