Amazon, Walmart Tell Consumers to Skip Returns of Unwanted Items

I&#x27;m all for making sensibly reasonable choices that eliminate pointless costs.<p>But somehow I also suspect that we&#x27;re being incrementally led down a path of things shipped to us at lightning speed, that we didn&#x27;t actually want or need, that raise the costs of everything else we buy, and contribute to the incredible amount of junk we have piling up in landfills, unrecyclable even though we&#x27;re led to think they are.<p>I guess it also tells you how cheaply and at a profit things are being manufactured compared to what you pay for them, that they can absorb this kind of overhead.

Bought a brand new OLED off of Amazon. Arrived and set it up. A week later the picture goes out. I register the TV with manufacturer and open a ticket for repair. Meanwhile since it’s the holidays I see what Amazon offers for support.<p>I chat with someone who helps me out. They are arranging a freight pickup courier to return the TV. I tell the agent I threw the box out to the TV. They said well without the box to ship it back I’d have to get one and it’s costly. So the agent refunded me the OLED TV with my word I’d e-waste the TV. Not even a week old. So I’m still waiting to see if the manufacturer will warranty repair the TV.<p>I’m wondering if I got lucky because of Covid or the holidays?

&gt; For inexpensive items or large ones that would incur hefty shipping fees, it is often cheaper to refund the purchase price and let customers keep the products.<p>I know many online shops which have done this for years, including amazon. It&#x27;s just a no-brainer to let the customer keep a broken comb instead of making them return it. Shipping costs, people who receive the package cost, opening and inspecting the packaging costs and just processing that return costs a lot. Almost everybody has access to a phone with a very decent camera, that&#x27;s enough to prove a product was broken on arrival.

Back in the day, I was selling bikinis.<p>We shipped them from Hong Kong directly to US customers which cost a mindbogglingly low $9 for the DHL shipping fees and the warehouse, and packaging, and all manual labor.<p>But to get a single return from somewhere in the US back to our centralized returns collection address (inside the US) would regularly cost $30+.<p>Average rate was 1.7x bikinis more ordered than kept, so in the end, we sold them at 2x manufacturing price + 1x ads price + 2x stripe fees. In case you&#x27;re wondering, the ads were our biggest cost factor...

I bought a mattress off of Amazon a few months back. I like it but my wife hated it. So I went to return it and Amazon said I could keep it. Put it in a guest bedroom, whatever I wanted. Refunded me the $400. I’m laying on it right now and sometimes feel guilty, but my wife is sleeping on our old queen sized bed so I guess I don’t feel that guilty, since eventually I’ll still need to get a mattress she likes.

Meanwhile in eBay, at least for the overseas sellers, you’ll have far better luck claiming non-receipt than broken. If broken, you’ll be asked to send it back, and I can’t ship stuff across the street for their cost to ship air around the world.

This explains the return I tried to make last week!<p>I bought a dip bar attachment for power racks so I could dip after my bench presses at the gym. These were $65. I also bought $15 barbell clamps.<p>Unfortunately, the dip bar attachments were too narrow for the power racks I was using. So I decided to return everything at once.<p>I was able to return the dip bars but when I tried to return the clamps, Amazon told me to keep the item despite refunding my money.<p>It was so weird.

I can&#x27;t even get Amazon to deliver&#x2F;resend&#x2F;refund items that never got to me <i>grumble</i>. I&#x27;ve had multiple orders lost for a month plus now and they&#x27;re like &quot;blah blah covid, please wait&quot;.<p>Or then I accepted an invite to Halo Band and it died on me 2 and a half months in, just stopped charging... not only did the support agent tell me to try using my phone charger (the Halo uses a proprietary connector...) to charge it, he then insisted I needed to <i>buy</i> a replacement power adapter and try that before they&#x27;d do anything. For a beta product that was (is?) invite only. Eventually I got Amazon to send me a new device, which came in a plastic baggy wit no bubble wrap dropped into one of their soft mailers with a refurb sticker on it...<p>I&#x27;m going to need them to get all of their departments on the same page.

Maybe a better idea is to ask the customer to destroy the product on video so that faking dissatisfaction with the product is discouraged.<p>Yes, this creates waste, but it would help to realign incentives between buyers and sellers.