Hacker News Reader

Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

The average quality of consumer goods has deteriorated so far that it's practically all trash on arrival. Of course they don't want returns coming back, it's a big fat waste stream and they want nothing to do with it beyond skimming their take as it blows past.

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

View on HN

I disagree with the "trash on arrival" assessment.

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.

On the flip side, it seems people have become somewhat entitled by Walmart’s “we’ll take anything back”. Such as trying to return unused generators to local retailers after the hurricane has passed.

Unused? Costco had to stop returns on TVs because people were “renting” them for free for the superb owl.

Oh man. Unwanted memories. I used to work at Future Shop (basically Best Buy) [don't judge I was young:]. Every summer people would buy a camcorder, go on vacation, then return a sandy "unused" camera.

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

Unless it's different where you are you can still pull the Super Bowl rental at Costco. Returns on electronics are still accepted, just time limited to 90 days instead of "forever".

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.

Wait, they accepted to refund a broken, 7 years old product ?

How was this policy not abused to the point of killing the company ?

I believe Costco will cancel (and refund) a membership at their own discretion. I’ve read stories online that they have cancelled memberships for clearly exploiting return policies, as well as other things like grossly mistreating warehouse employees.

Yep, exactly this. Costco is willing to eat a few people abusing the system in return for those sweet sweet membership profits, but if you start to seriously abuse the system they have zero problem kicking you out.

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.

The secret sauce: Costco sent that TV back to the company who sold it, and deducted the value from the next invoice.

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.

Well I think most people would not return in this sort of scenario.

Please, please do not correct that typo!

You'd probably like https://reddit.com/r/superbowl

Fixing that typo can be an expensive correction.

In the music world it's called "guitar center free rental."

Return "dead" Christmas tree in January? https://nypost.com/2018/01/10/woman-returns-dead-christmas-t...

It's pining for the fjords.

I pay fifteen euro per year to have unlimited shit delivered and picked up at my house 7 days and nights a week. How a delivery service is supposed to make a profit on that is beyond me, it's sweatshop level of insanity, but it is my capitalist duty not to ask questions and just consume people and planet be damned.

> unlimited shit delivered

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

Returning products does use energy though, often in the form of gas or diesel. It may be more ecological to simply ask consumers to destroy some items such as plastic totes (bulky) or masonry (heavy).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com