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The Painful, Costly Journey of Returned Goods -- and How You End Up Purchasing Some of Them Again (cnbc.com)
Buyers return a huge number of packages they buy from Amazon and other e-commerce sites, so much so that retailers are sometimes left with little choice but to get rid of large swaths of inventory at a cost. Last year, customers in the U.S. returned about $351 billion worth of items that they had purchased from brick-and-mortar retailers and online stores, according to estimates by National Retail Federation. CNBC: There's a good chance that the $100 printer, the $300 wide-screen monitor, or the $170 router you recently bought from Amazon weren't supplied to the e-commerce giant by their original manufacturers. In fact, the order may have been fulfilled by someone like Casey Parris, who resells items that customers previously returned to retailers. Based in Florida, Parris spends about five hours each day visiting thrift stores and scanning auction and liquidation websites for interesting items, he told CNBC. Sometimes he finds auto parts, other times it's a pair of sneakers, and occasionally he purchases printer cartridges -- all with the goal of reselling them.
Walter Blake, who lives in Michigan, does the same. For years, he's been selling electronic items on Amazon that he acquires from a network of places. Blake and Parris are part of a growing cottage industry where dealers acquire discarded items at very low prices, only to resell some of them back on Amazon and eBay at a premium.
Walter Blake, who lives in Michigan, does the same. For years, he's been selling electronic items on Amazon that he acquires from a network of places. Blake and Parris are part of a growing cottage industry where dealers acquire discarded items at very low prices, only to resell some of them back on Amazon and eBay at a premium.
There's nothing wrong with reselling a returned item. It's a good form of recycling as it's better than tossing it into the dump. So long as the item is pretty much "new" I could care less. I've gotten refurbished Chromebooks before that you could swear were "new" because they were in such good shape.
The major difference being that at least eBay is honest about what they are, and when you buy from Seller X, you get items from Seller X. Amazon wants to be a marketplace and an individual market, and apparently has been known to bin items together under the assumption that they're all identical, so Item A bought from Seller X might be Seller Y's item. How are you supposed to trust that?
I've had this same thing happen from New Egg, won't order from them either!
This is a sad shift of where we have come as a culture. It used to be that retailers that opted to provide high end customer service would include 'no questions asked' return policies and their premium customers appreciated this flexibility but mostly did not take advantage of it.
Roll the clock forward and we now have people that knowingly abuse these policies. I know of people personally along with all sorts of anecdotes where they have purchased a big screen TV for the super bowl or a PPV fight or similar, throw a watching party, and then take the unit back for a full refund AND SEE NOTHING WRONG WITH DOING THIS. Their rationale is often that other people do it so why not, and/or the store lets me do it so what's the issue.
The retailer often has no choice because all of their competition allow it so they will lose customers if they do not. This is often really hard on small locally owned stores because they have to compete with the chains, but do not have the purchasing power to push all those returns back to the vendor and so just have to eat up the discount they have to give to sell the 'previously opened' unit to someone else. And no, you can't just box it up and sell it as a new item - if you know it has been previously opened then legally in the US you are not allowed to sell it as 'new'.
So at the end of the day the manufacturers and the retailers all mark their products up to recover the losses due to returns and the people who actually pay for things end up covering the cost of the asshats who think it is their right to game the system. There are of course cases where things need to be returned because they don't fit or are not the right color or w/e, but with most purchases you should be able to figure those things out without opening and using the product.
Then they wouldn't be "destroyed" and they wouldn't get full insurance value for them. Also, they're super-paranoid someone will sue over mold-induced sickness.
This.
I worked at Tim's growing up (prominent Canadian coffee shop, for you internationals) and we'd throw out large amounts of food/donuts at the end of the day. These were still very much edible for at least another day. (Trust me... they were.)
One time, someone made the comment that we were throwing out so much stuff and I just had to ask, "Hey why don't these go to folks who actually need some food?" and the answer was simple; they can't risk the lawsuits if someone gets sick. There was also something in there about taking advantage (baker overcooks on purpose so more food gets "thrown out" for a good cause).
In other words; we are our worst enemy. Almost everytime we try to do something to help others, there's always some people who will go above and beyond to take advantage of you.
I tend to rant.
I used to shop A LOT at Micro Center, so I got to know the store manager pretty well. My return rate was always around 5%-10%, which they considered pretty normal. But they had one guy who's return rate was over 100%. The infuriating part to me is that he had to go over $10K in purchases before they banned him. Yes, you read that right, he returned Every. Single. Thing. he ever bought. But that's only 100%. Yup. They had an amnesty period when they first opened, where you could return things without a receipt, and he had returned an old copy of Microsoft Office. This was about 20 years ago or so, so it was a substantial amount of money. People like that really ought to be taken out back and shot.