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Amazon Slammed for Destroying As-New and Returned Goods (fortune.com)
Amazon is destroying "massive amounts" of as-new and returned items, raising the ire of the German government and environmental campaigners, local media reported. Fortune: The types of items being destroyed here go way beyond the "health and personal care" products that Amazon has long been destroying when people return them, for sanitary reasons. We're talking things like washing machines, smartphones and furniture. The revelation drew an angry response from the German government and environmental campaigners. "This is a huge scandal," Jochen Flasbarth from the German environment ministry told WirtschaftsWoche. "We are consuming these resources despite all the problems in the world. This approach is not in step with our times." Greenpeace's Kirsten Brodde said there was a need for a new "law on banning the waste and destruction of first-hand and usable goods."
This.
I spent a summer working in Office Depot's Returns Consolidation Center in Auburn, WA. We accepted returns from pretty much every Office Depot west of the Mississippi River. And Chicago. At times, I'd receive bubble wrap, or pallet wrap, or boxes...I could use all of these, especially the boxes for repack...but no. They have to get destroyed. They were brand new, unopened (or still folded, for the boxes) and immediately useful to us. But bureaucratic paperwork says it needs to be destroyed, so out the went.
The amount of HP ink cartridges I received still baffles me. And whoever packed those water coolers for return that still had water in them, may your ancestors forever be cursed to torment in hell!
They would actually have to pay equal or more than full price. The logistics and stocking of these types of items is high because of the rarity and high defect rate. This is why non-profits and volunteers usually soak up the middle costs in getting used items to that low cost sector. However, unlike regular retail, there is no steady supply of the items, its a hit or miss. So the supply chains to move this stuff needs to be recreated over and over again which adds to the high cost.
I have seen two local businesses that did just this, go out of business due to the overhead involved. They rented cheap space and basically got used/opened/defective merchandise from local big stores. Think perfect sofas with a broken foot or unopened laundry detergent with a ripped label. They got the stuff for like 90% off. They did their own transport. And for some stuff, they couldn't keep them on the shelves. But there was much they had to pay for disposal because it wouldn't sell and just took up space (again, no volume in disposal). So they had to be careful of what they took on and customers wouldn't find the same bargain every visit. The overhead involved in each specific item, just wasn't worth it.