The report would be a lot more useful if there were some context for this data. How many items do comparable places like Wal Mart warehouses destroy each week? What's the reason for these items being marked for destruction? What percentage of the products are these; how many items go through the warehouse per week that are not destroyed?<p>I expect these are products returned with defects, that have been issued recalls, that were damaged during shipping, that expired, and all the other streams that aren't the 'happy path' of New product from manufacturer -> Amazon warehouse -> End user for lifetime of product. (Edit: or returned with no defects other than a lack of assured quality and possibly damaged packaging, but still not economically viable to ship back, verify, repackage, and relist as new and unused).<p>How much money, time, and energy would it take to ship them back to manufacturers where expert technicians could refurbish them to like-new condition if they're broken and fixable, to mark them down and sell them as blemished if they're cosmetically unacceptable but still functional, or to otherwise rescue them from destruction? As an industrial controls engineer in the manufacturing sector, I expect it's a lot more than just discarding it and fabricating a new one from raw materials on an automated production line.<p>I try to make my lines as flexible as possible, but there's an economy of scale problem that won't be put back into Pandora's box by shaming people with articles containing big numbers. Economics are immune to guilt, you have to find another way to penalize the behaviors you dislike or incentivize the behaviors you want. The reality is that it's really cheap and fast to build new things with low-touch mass production, making them easily diagnosed and repaired is less efficient, and the math says that it's cheaper to make 98% of your parts cheaply and write of 2% to waste than it is to spend 10% more per unit and have zero waste. I expect that the solution has to come either from technology that makes repair, self-diagnosis, packaging, and/or shipping cheaper, or from regulation that makes the 2% write off more expensive than 2%. Regardless of the solution, moralizing is ineffective.
First of all, "130K" is a meaningless number except as a <i>percentage</i> of items sold/returned. Curiously, the article neglects to mention this. Plus, you need to compare that percentage with other retailers.<p>Second, this happens with any business.<p>For new products, it's stuff Amazon has determined simply isn't selling and is unprofitable to continue storing in the limited warehouse space. Better to chuck it and make space for products that are actually selling.<p>While for returns, they're going to be items that are similarly unprofitable to sell. "Amazon Warehouse" is the seller on Amazon that sells returned items -- and they resell a <i>ton</i> of the returns -- but there isn't always a price point that is both low enough that people are willing to buy the cheaper returned item, but still high enough that it's profitable for Amazon to continuing stocking it and ship it.<p>Now a lot of businesses (e.g. BestBuy I'm assuming) sell certain types of returned items, particularly electronics, in bulk to eBay resellers. That's where you can people selling things like a single model of webcam in "open box" condition for ~50% off retail, they've got 100 units for sale that "may have cosmetic scratches but 100% functional" and the photograph is "representative". Which is great. But since Amazon has its own internal "Amazon Warehouse" reseller, I'm not sure it ever does this.
This is not ideal, but par for the course in the CPG sector. You’d be shocked how much food your local grocery store throws out each week too.<p>Also the quality of the reporting is very poor and mostly seems intent at just making Amazon look bad. How much do others destroy? It’s a lot. There’s no ability for the reader to understand if this is bad (relatively speaking) or not.
Amazon warehouses are shelters for things. Either someone pays the fee and adopts the thing, or it goes to the farm upstate.<p>There are lots of thing mills breeding special things that wind up in the shelter. It's a cold and cruel business, but that's humans trying to make a buck for you.<p>If things don't get adopted, they don't always get killed though. Sometimes they get adopted for pennies on the dollar, and move elsewhere in the system.
This has been known for years, at least in Europe. German article from 2018: <a href="https://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/handel/das-ist-ein-riesengrosser-skandal-amazon-vernichtet-massenhaft-neuware/22658544.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/handel/das-ist-ein-riesengro...</a><p>Edit: people replying seem to think that I'm saying that:<p>1. only Amazon does this;
2. it can be prevented but Amazon just chooses not to.<p>I didn't say any of those things.
A significant amount of items don't get destroyed however; many are sold on the liquidation market.<p><a href="https://www.liquidation.com/c/sourcedfromamazonliquidations" rel="nofollow">https://www.liquidation.com/c/sourcedfromamazonliquidations</a>
Trashing returns of perfectly good products is unfortunately nothing new. I had a friend who worked at a transfer station in the early 2000s that got sent returns from PetSmart. The return reason was written on a label. Some stuff was defective of course, but others, it was some trivial reason like the customer didn't like the color. The item was in otherwise perfect condition and going to the landfill. I name PetSmart only because my friend was on the lookout for pet stuff; it would be no surprise if other retailers had the same policy.
I'm not sure if this is missed or brushed aside on purpose in the article. There is a crucial difference between destroying something and burning it to the ground vs removing something from circulation in a product chain and reusing any raw materials left by third party services.<p>This isn't much different than a product being rejected during manufacturing due to something like failed quality control, etc. If you're going to be outraged by this please apply that outrage consistently starting by studying how manufacturing works and then boycotting basically all factories that make anything.
I wonder if clothing returns often get destroyed. I know a lot of people will bulk order like 10 bathing suits with the intention of only keeping one or two.
I very rarely return stuff I have bought but don't end up liking (and I try to only buy stuff I know I want), and stories like this make it even more likely that I will instead resell them on local auction websites instead. Might get a little less money out of it but at least I can be more certain that the product is actually going to be used.
CBC Market place did a bit on that in Canada:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1yqcagavfY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1yqcagavfY</a>
I used to sell physical products on Amazon. They told me once some of my products were damaged “in shipment” and unsellable. I had to pay to return them to me, or they could just trash them.
<i>This</i> is what people should really be angry about, not the 'peeing in bottles' working conditions.<p>This directly results in wasted labour, wasted resources, wasted money, and extra environmental damage. And all because amazon doesn't have any serious competition to force them not to waste those resources.
Ok, I can understand that this is how capitalism and consumerism work, it's a lot cheaper just to trash the item and manufacture a new one instead of to check returns, but why don't they donate them to schools, communities, churches (or even better gift them to low paying amazon warehouse workers)??? Out of ~130k items per week they only donated ~30k items.