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Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

>The person who ordered the item would get to keep the product and receive a refund

Everyone seems to be ignoring this part. Retailers have adopted a new "just keep it" return policy[1]. Which is pretty obviously causing this fraud. "Item never arrived" can be fixed by adding $1 to the shipping label to force a signature

With no bad intent - about 80% of my Target returns are "just keep it", about 10% for Walmart and 0% for Amazon. But I have neighbors with about 50% on Amazon. No idea how the algorithms work but perhaps these groups have also figured that part out.

Stop the "just keep it", require some sort of security on delivery (lock box, signature) and this problem disappears overnight

[1]https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/26/business/retail-returns/index...

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> "Item never arrived" can be fixed by adding $1 to the shipping label to force a signature

In my experience, drivers will sign for and leave "signature required" deliveries quite a lot of the time. I've had signature-required international shipments worth thousands of dollars signed for by the driver and left sitting in front of my house.

Thats great, driver committed fraud, payout goes from shipping company insurance.

`Getting a signature` is very 1900s. I'd expect to see more like what Amazon do for various high-value packages (maybe even high-fraud), you are given a code which has to be verified by the delivery driver before they will give you the code.

As you say, makes delivery more expensive, as the drivers can no longer just leave packages and makes the interaction longer (+ more redelivery required).

Ain’t going to be long before you have to have a ring to get Amazon deliveries.

"Forcing a signature" doesn't work with throw-and-go delivery. In the common best case, someone is home and takes a few minutes to get to the door. In the average case, nobody answers and it needs to be redelivered several days in a row. Making this more efficient would require redesigning last mile delivery to include scheduled time windows, buffering packages per-recipient, etc.

In the early 2000's I was adjacent to a company designing a locking box that delivery services would have the code to and leave packages in. I don't think this went anywhere because it was too far ahead of its time, but I could see Amazon encouraging something like this for customers in problematic areas (weren't/aren't they trying something with being able to open your garage door?).

IME whether you need to return something really depends on the item and why. If it's damaged grocery items from Target/Walmart/Chewy, nobody really wants them back. Whereas Amazon invariably wants the stuff back through their automated solution, but talking to someone (which I only do for exceptional cases) seems to invariably result in "just keep it" and a refund. I'm sure there is some surveillance-based solution behind this, deciding based on social credit score and whatnot. My only questions are how singular it is (eg Retail Equation), and when that dystopian hammer is finally going to drop.

There are already Amazon lockers (in some places). But it's an option rather than mandated.

"Amazon lockers" are at places other than your home. So unless they're somewhere you're already going to be going, at the right time, for other reasons, that option is much less convenient. Especially if your other plans change and you now need to go out of your way to get your package.

But Amazon offers lockers for apartment communities. It's not a public locker, but if something gets shipped to your address it automatically ends up in the locker. This is very convenient, but the fact that it's offered shows how dominant their position is

And how much would it cost in terms of delivery time? For me it's really all about it.

Your delivery service costs $1B per year with the current throughput (without considering peaks etc.). Imagine now adding those constraints such as signature: it means that for each package you add another 1-2-3 minutes at least. For 100 packages a day it's almost 2 hours. With a salary of 7$ per hour = 14$ per day just to have signatures. And that's 100 packages, which is probably a joke for a delivery person.

14$ per day = almost 5K per year. Basically 700K is peanuts.

The problem of course starts when everyone believes "oh I am smarter than you, I can also do it". And then you lose not 700K but 50 millions or more.

Another way is to build up your own delivery company, measure performance of the delivery people (with feedback) and fire/sue them when you notice a continuous loss of packages and reward the good ones.

I also never had Amazon tell me to just keep it. Even some small $5-$10 item I scuff at driving to the UPS store.

Walmart often tells me to keep $5-$10 items despite the fact I have Walmart+, they are often in the neighborhood and happy to leave it outside for pickup.

This is interesting feedback. I wonder if Amazon takes it back so they can resell to recyclers? Still, I struggle to think if this makes sense. Or maybe they are trying to discourage no-return scams.

It's too costly to ship the item back. For small items this is a no brainer, and for very large items as well. There's a sweet spot where the return cost not so high as to kill the profit and the item can still be resold - packaged electronics come to mind.

A lot of the time the cost of the return is worth more than the possible value of getting the object back to the company.

Then they actually profited, and didnt lose $700k

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