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Comment by havblue | Hacker News Reader

I remember back in high school, everyone would have an Eddie Bauer backpack except the random person with a Jansport. People would always insist on how you had to take advantage of the quality guarantee:

"You have a bent zipper and a small tear after lugging your books for years? Great! Take it to the store and argue with them that it's defective until they give you a new backpack!"

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LL Bean used to have a similar return policy but people started abusing it; now you only have a year.

A number of outdoor sports retailers that used to have no-questions-asked return policies and internal repair departments have dropped them. I have known people who basically had a practice of indefinitely returning worn out clothing for replacement. I did return a jacket to Patagonia a number of years back and they gave me a decent credit but, in my defense it had basically completely delaminated.

When LL Bean ended their lifetime return policy, their CEO wrote this:

> Increasingly, a small, but growing number of customers has been interpreting our guarantee well beyond its original intent. Some view it as a lifetime product replacement program, expecting refunds for heavily worn products used over many years. Others seek refunds for products that have been purchased through third parties, such as at yard sales.

People were buying old items on eBay and returning them to the store to get a brand new item.

I think that's increasingly true. A lot of people want to game the system and you mostly don't want to place the burden of what's reasonable on a low-paid customer service worker. So you set reasonable and (mostly firm) time limits and let the processes take their course. Should be some wiggle room of course. But it's not reasonable to offer lifetime replacements unless people are willing to pay the 2x to 3x prices that implies--which very few will.

Bad faith actors ruin everything good eventually. From small things like return policies for retail chains, to the political process of an entire country.

Yup. I've personally known people who, shamelessly, would get a Keurig from Costco, drink all the sample pods, and then exchange for a new one, repeatedly.

You've always had some proportion of con artists/grifters of course but anecdotally it does seem that there is a higher proportion of people in the US who will, if not flagrantly steal, will do things like this especially against corporations that they mentally categorize as being evil.

Society can handle a small percentage of grifters, they've always been there and always will be. The change is that enshittification is mainstream in the corporate world and feels indistinguishable from being scammed. People begin to feel immersed in it and stop seeing the world as mostly honest and instead as mostly scams. Then good faith policies like these return policies get burned by way more people who lost trust in the system. Then we lose those too.

I sort of hate the "enshitification" term that gets thrown around way too lazily. But, for a variety of reasons, people are tending to deal with larger corporations for the most part and--hey--if I get some money on the side because of a mistake? Whatever. In a way I wouldn't have at some local store.

Ringing up expensive grocery items as cheap SKU at Whole Foods self checkout...

Going on shopping sprees and then calling the credit card company to report it as fraud...

Buying a fancy dress to wear for a few nights out and then returning it...

All things people close to me have done, or continue to do on a regular basis

Talking about a relatively "privileged" class of people here- multiple homes, multiple cars, kids in private school- not struggling single moms working double shifts to put food on the table.

Something's broken in our society.

I mean, some of those things, and others examples are "just" being an asshole/abusing goodwill.

But some of your examples are actually committing crimes, the first two in particular - especially that second.

True. I never used their return, but a lot of my newer ll bean stuff has had problems a couple years out, so I stopped buying from there. I feel like they’re using as an excuse to lower their quality.

(Jacket zipper just broke and the buttons that held the inside insulation of a jacket came off, shoe sole issues).

I sent an Eagle Creek suitcase in and they honored the warranty even though it's maybe 15 years old. They sent it to a repair place who actually fixed every single issue with it (first a broken wheel, then later a torn pocket, broken buckle, and missing zipper pulls). I honestly can't believe that the repairs are cheaper than just replacing it, but it has worked out really well. It's a shame more places don't do that.

I still main a Jansport backpack for taking my laptop in. It has minor wear and tear but works great after >10 years.

Similar anecdote here.

I still use daily the Timberland backpack I got in 2009. Again, some wear and tear (actually just wear, thankfully no tears) but works great at the 17 year mark, even though it has gone through anything from daily use to travel to trekking.

Other backpacks have come and gone when I thought it'd need replacing, but kept trudging on. Now I don't want to have to let go of it, even though it looks "a bit" old.

I know it's not good for business to have long-lasting products. But some items like this backpack, a 2008 Fujitsu workstation, or a 2013 MacBook Air (not to mention the Faber Castell TK 4600) that simply keep on working become something akin to lifelong companion tools.

It goes to show the benefits of deep forethought and good design. And, I guess, the stubbornness of some users :)

You did’t even have to argue with Jansport. The threading was coming undone on my 15 year old Jansport backpack, so I mailed it in, they fixed it, and sent it back to me. Still using it almost 30 years after originally buying it,

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