Returned online purchases often sent to landfill

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/it-s-pretty-staggering-returned-online-purchases-often-sent-to-landfill-journalist-s-research-reveals-1.5393806

by pwg • 7 years ago

179 157 7 years ago

cbc.ca

zmzrr3• 7 years ago

Amazon has faced accusations of destroying returned items in both France and Germany.

...and? Is this where we are going, I can't do whatever the fuck I want with the stuff I own?

esotericn9• 7 years ago

You can do whatever you want.

Other people are free to have opinions of you.

Destroying something that someone could use is a dick move.

zmzrr3• 7 years ago

If you click the links you will see they want to outlaw it.

VeninVidiaVicii2• 7 years ago

The problem is more about disposal and not ownership -- throwing things away that never get used just makes pointless trash.

esotericn9• 7 years ago

Right.

You own the object.

Your ownership claim over the landfill, or the air around you if you burn it, or whatever else, is far weaker.

licebmi__at__• 7 years ago

You seem to think this is not already the case. There's a lot of stuff you're not able to do with the things you own.

And it makes total sense, owning only makes sense as a societal concensus, otherwise, you might own something until someone stronger clubs you in the face and gets your stuff. We agreed that individuals having some rights over things is benefitial for society as a whole, it makes sense to restrict those rights if we see they cause harm.

acangiano• 7 years ago

We, as a society, really need to stop being so laissez-faire when it comes to unnecessary waste. Laws might be required for actual change to happen. Like French grocery stores having to donate excess food rather than throwing it away.

clarry2• 7 years ago

Last week I took a pause during my grocery shopping to grab and eat a banana inside the store. They had a bin you can eat from; that's where they put the produce that's looking old or battered and would soon have to be discarded anyway.

I was super hungry, and grateful for that banana. A man with two kids also grabbed some for the young ones.

It's a small thing and probably doesn't achieve much in the end but I really like the idea.

Packaged food is sold at a discount near its expiry date.

hprotagonist3• 7 years ago

This is a good chance to plug for https://wornwear.patagonia.com/

Worn Wear is Patagonia's hub for keeping gear in play.

Why extend the life of gear? Because the best thing we can do for the planet is cut down on consumption and get more use out of stuff we already own.

Join us to repair, share and recycle your gear.

AIUI, online returns that are slightly mangled and in store returns that aren’t quite like-new are also sold here, as well as serviceable but old clothes you can exchange.

NB you can also perpetually repair most patagonia clothes, for free. They do most repairs in contract with local tailors, and have a central repair shop for bigger jobs, so they keep money in the neighborhood and also cut way down on shipping emissions.

fny• 7 years ago

So, these aren't really "worn" correct? At first, I assumed the inventory was thrift and my jaw dropped when I saw the prices. They should consider rebranding...

hprotagonist3• 7 years ago

They can be quite worn. The pricing is scaled relative to how comparatively worn an item is.

Alex3917• 7 years ago

They say that at least some of them are really worn, and there is a tag inside each garment explaining how to return it after you're done with it. How many are actually worn, I have no idea.

I'm seeing more and more stores these days selling brand new things as refurbished just as a form of price differentiation. Unless you really believe that Kitchen Aid has hundreds of returned stand mixers in every single color.

rjsw• 7 years ago

The company isn't known as Patagucci for nothing.

asutekku• 7 years ago

These are pretty normal prices for used Patagonia. It’s one of those brands that don’t drop so fast in value.

clSTophEjUdRanu• 7 years ago

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing.

bjelkeman-again• 7 years ago

There are others that do a good job on clothes. Not for returns maybe, but long term support.

Nudie Jeans have repair shops in quite a few cities. The repairs are free. If you don’t like to keep your jeans then they give you a discount (20%?) if you trade your old Nudies in. The sell them second hand after they fix them up. I got a recent pair repaired (unusable before the repair) and bought a second hand pair for $50. So effectively I got two pairs for $25 each. Never buying any other brand jeans again I think. https://www.nudiejeans.com/repair-spots#stores

Trippen shoes in German repair their shoes. I have had shoes from them for at least 20 years. I wore some for 12-15 years with a good refurbishment in between. They are not cheap, but comfortable, sturdy and refurbishable. They mailed them back to me when done. https://en.trippen.com/reparaturen

Houdini Sportsware recycle their old clothes. They also buy back used and resell. https://houdinisportswear.com/en-us

a3n2• 7 years ago

I had an REI jacket, problem with the zipper. They replaced the zipper, and all the buttons on the zipper flap. Free. I think I gave the jacket away eventually, a very good jacket.

Red_Leaves_Flyy• 7 years ago

Time for the bay to disrupt online returns?

jacquesm5• 7 years ago

That's already happened in some places: https://www.buybay.com/

Havoc2• 7 years ago

Yup - that's why I try to shop on Amazon's warehouse/open box site first. 90% of the time it's brand new stuff anyway that someone sent back on a whim.

The fact that it's cheaper helps too

nashashmi2• 7 years ago

I find the discount is little and the drawback is high

rahimnathwani• 7 years ago

I try to do the same, and am usually happy, but:

- recently the price difference on many items isn't worth the risk (e.g. a saving of 5% off the regular price)

- sometimes you receive an item that someone has fraudulently returned (e.g. someone has an old broken item, buy a new one from Amazon, and return the old one pretending they just changed their mind); I had this happen once for an expensive item ($600), and the original return slip was still in the box. It was obvious that the item returned had been used for quite some time, and didn't work.

- the items don't seem to be checked too well: I recently received an item which was missing an essential part

Still, Amazon's return process is great when they're at fault, so overall it's still worth it.

Havoc2• 7 years ago

Yeah it is a roll of the dice.

Recently purchased an older zenbook this way and it has clearly seen some use (and battery was dead). Still happy though since the similarly priced netbooks I was looking at were garbage spec'd.

dredmorbius4• 7 years ago

This makes an interesting counterpoint to "Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21786747

Individuals duplicating content without taking from the creator is viewed less acceptable than manufacturers, or more accurately, retailers, deliberately destroying perfectly serviceable physical product.

esotericn9• 7 years ago

Individuals duplicating content without taking from the creator is viewed less acceptable than manufacturers, or more accurately, retailers, deliberately destroying perfectly serviceable physical product.

By whom? I don't think this is true at all.

It's less acceptable to the sellers of said goods, not to society at large.

The legal system doesn't represent the will of the people in all cases; in the case of copyright law it's quite obviously weighted more towards representing the will of money.

coding1232• 7 years ago

No one would want to create content. So in a backwards way, we want content, so it's our will to have copyright law. If you can suggest another way we can have shows like Dexter I think you should speak up.

dredmorbius4• 7 years ago

By whom?

Well, the eyes of the law, for starters, and all that that includes and implies.

madengr5• 7 years ago

Shows you how much the stuff actually costs to manufacture when it is just thrown away. Probably just sweatshop labor costs and shipping.

iguy5• 7 years ago

Yup. Clothing has been a famously high-margin business since long before the internet, though. Like > 70% margins being normal for department stores, IIRC.

Which does not imply the rest is profit, of course (since all the competing stores do the same). More like that they threw half of it out at the end of the season.

madengr5• 7 years ago

I buy pants at Costco. Their $20 Kirkland brand pants last for years. JC Penny used to have a factory outlet here where I could buy XXLT polos for $6. I bought several years worth before they shut down.

My wife has an embroidery machine, so I get custom shirts. I have a yellow, red, and blue set of polos with Star Trek insignias, a Smith Chart, radio circuits, etc.

jhrkjweh3• 7 years ago

Look at this list of puffer jackets, with prices like $9200, $3500, $2000, $1500, $700 and a $80 one throw in (hey, we don't judge based on price).

https://www.gq.com/story/the-best-puffer-jackets

kevsim• 7 years ago

Why won't companies give the clothes to charities?
It's an image thing. They're trying to maintain exclusivity.

We’ve reached a pretty dismal place as a society where a company would rather burn their wares than to have a person in need get them.

nashashmi2• 7 years ago

Remove the stitched brand then?

jhrkjweh3• 7 years ago

Doesn't work. Today a simple reverse image search will re-identify the product.

shantly• 7 years ago

It’s kinda the title feature of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

tyingq• 7 years ago

In the 80's, stores like TJ Maxx would have branded items for very cheap, but the branding was cut off. Like Levi's jeans with the pocket tag and little brown rectangle cut off. I suppose that was for the same reason.

Marsymars2• 7 years ago

Oh I’d be totally into that. As is, I carefully use small scissors to remove brands/logos from any clothes/goods where they’re attached via stitching.

VeninVidiaVicii2• 7 years ago

This is pretty much the same scenario as the Grapes of Wrath, except with food.

TeMPOraL• 7 years ago

Wouldn't "that, but with food", be the story of the Great Depression? AFAIR from history lessons, people would routinely destroy perfectly good crops and food shipments to keep the price high.

JoeAltmaier4• 7 years ago

Clothing is the bottom of the heap for donations. Our church rumble sale, we ban donated clothes. Nobody buys them; they go to the dump.

javajosh• 7 years ago

That'd sad. It seems to me that if there is such a glut a poor person in the US should basically never have to buy clothes.

anigbrowl2• 7 years ago

Why don't you just give them to poor people? You know,for free?

jhrkjweh3• 7 years ago

Imagine seeing poor kids wearing authentic Supreme/Balenciaga and holding iPhone X's. Who would buy those things anymore?

The only reason to buy a luxury brand is to signal that you are not poor.

cmdshiftf4• 7 years ago

You're getting slammed for simply pointing out how luxury goods work. Obviously a Prada coat isn't worth 10-20x the price of a non-Prada coat, but the value in the signal provided by it clearly makes up the difference for those purchasing it. Removing that signal makes it merely another coat, in a market flooded with non-Prada coats, and hence becomes comparatively useless to everyone. That less-wealthy people will flock to, and keep demand high for, knock-off designer goods to try to obtain the same signal without the price tag in favour of just buying a quality product at their own price point only emboldens that point. There's value in the signal, that signal is exclusivity by virtue of wealth, and if the exclusivity of that signal reduces or is removed then it becomes worthless to everyone involved.

IPhones are a different matter. They haven't much of a signal of exclusivity or wealth because, for whatever reason, even the poor will seemingly make whatever sacrifice they need to, or impose on others, to get their hands on them. I'm regularly on transit through some very, very poor areas and yet their kids all have iPhones, often the very latest. God knows what was done to enable that circumstance, but it's quite different from, say, a legitimate Prada jacket.

jacquesm5• 7 years ago

It's much worse than that. There are so many things that are manufactured simply to be discarded it is amazing. 100's of millions of tons of stuff get thrown away every year whose only purpose in life was to be tossed or in the very best of cases to be recycled.

And then there is the endless stream of stuff that people gift each other because they are clueless about what a real gift would be like but they still want to give something. Terrible toys, terrible tools (break on first use) and cargo cult merchandise looking like the real thing but actually being just that: an image of the real thing.

jodrellblank2• 7 years ago

they are clueless about what a real gift would be like

What would a real gift be like?

jacquesm5• 7 years ago

Something that you actually use and that stays around for a while.

esotericn9• 7 years ago

At a minimum, something that someone will actually use or appreciate.

Stocking filler plastic tat is not that. It's completely useless and either gets stashed in a store room or binned immediately.

I had thought this would just be intuitively obvious to anyone - buying stuff that's lower quality than you could personally use is just burning money.

I'd prefer that if someone can't afford or doesn't want to spend enough to get something useful they just don't at all. Spend the money on yourself or on charity.

faissaloo• 7 years ago

A real gift is something handcrafted and unique.

Freak_NL3• 7 years ago

The Japanese have always held to the notion that a good gift is consumable (in a small home a non-consumable, unthoughtful gift can become a burden fast). Think premium fruits, a nice bottle of wine, or edible souvenirs from whatever region you are visiting from (although these could do with a lot less packaging plastic). That's a mindset that ought to be embraced more widely — leaving the occasional non-consumable gift for when you know someone will appreciate and want it.

Also, books can be great gifts if you don't burden to receiver with the expectation to keep them (although they might). Nothing wrong with re-gifting books to friends, family, or colleagues. But again, only if you know the tastes of the recipient.

axaxs2• 7 years ago

I've always thought it should be illegal or heavily disincentivized to create such throw away products, but have never figured out a good way to actually measure this. No company is going to admit to creating junk.

ryandrake• 7 years ago

No company wants to admit they make junk, but you can measure this at the landfill. If there was some magic way to scan every product as the city processes waste and learn the product's manufacturer, then you could require that companies pay the cost of disposal of their goods. Suppose this magical scanner could tell the difference between products too: Then you could charge the company 10x more for hazardous waste, etc. I always thought this would be the most fair way to charge companies for this negative externality. When a company makes throwaway junk, the customer shouldn't have to pay for it, and society shouldn't either. In a perfect world, it would be billable back to the company.

grecy• 7 years ago

If we ever get serious about climate change it will be illegal.

But it's going to be very hard because that means killing some profitable businesses, and right now profit is more important than the planet.

sbierwagen• 7 years ago

Easy: heavily tax solid waste.

esotericn9• 7 years ago

Agree. I really try to just not buy new stuff nowadays.

Food packaging and things like building materials are the most difficult.

There are certain things that I think make sense to buy new or 'lightly used' - if you're going to run a vehicle (bicycle, motorcycle, car, whatever) into the ground then you're getting full use of it; and cars, at least until they're almost completely useless and melted for scrap, have a decent ecosystem for second hand parts.

In some sense I think manufacturing has become too 'good' relative to human labour. We're throwing things away because it "costs more" to repair them.

But it doesn't really cost more - it just costs more in monetary terms because waste (both in manufacturing and disposal) is externalized.

Freak_NL3• 7 years ago

But it doesn't really cost more - it just costs more in monetary terms because waste (both in manufacturing and disposal) is externalized.

And actually making the environmental impact and waste recovery part of the price won't happen, because the masses will then vote for the populist party that promises not to take away your daily steak and cheap appliances.

We're kind of fucked — although I would love to have some glimmer of hope to hold on to.

joveian• 7 years ago

Sometimes it is automation related but I think more often it is due to the near slavery conditions of much of the world. Obvious slavery and colonialism is no longer fashionable but the current economic system acheives much the same effect by other means. Wealthy countries use a varity of methods to keep the rest of the world producing goods at low cost. Even "fair trade", while slightly better than non-"fair trade" is rarely anywhere near what anyone purchasing items would consider fair if on the other end of the transaction. A global minimum wage or global basic income would do a lot to reduce waste.

Some waste is related to health or the logistics of mass production and would not be eliminated without more radical changes (and in some cases might not be possible to eliminated without major effects on health, such as many disposable items used in health care). In theory, manufacturing could work the way scientific exchanges is supposed to, with knowledge shared, and production more localized. This could also reduce waste quite a bit but is obviously a much larger and more difficult change from the current system.

WalterBright2• 7 years ago

I actually buy a lot of things from the thrift store and the pawn shop. Mostly things like books, dvds, records, file cabinets, tools, tool boxes, TVs, tablets, luggage, cables, and other electronics. For example, just last week I bought a high quality set of jumper cables for $5. A while back I bought a very nice oscilloscope in perfect order for $40.

When I'm done with it it goes back to the thrift store :-)

smitty1e2• 7 years ago

There is a tragic connection between capitalism and materialism.

Celebrate the former; be wary of the latter.

nsomaru2• 7 years ago

Is there a difference between the two?

Capitalist analysis tends to favour material progress as if this is the zenith of human existence.

Markets are useful but they only cover a third of human life, the physical (although money is abstract it represents the ability to command material goods and services). The emotional and intellectual are reduced to second class citizens in service of the master munching market.

GrayTextIsTruth• 7 years ago

There is a tragic connection between free-market and capitalism.

Celebrate the former; be wary of the latter.

rb8082• 7 years ago

I've finally bought my house, its pretty scary how much is designed to last 10 years. Kitchen Appliances, HW heater, HVAC, matresses, furniture seems normal to have a steady stream of stuff heading to the landfill.

madengr5• 7 years ago

HVAC stuff is modular and easy to fix yourself provided you don’t need to open the refrigerant lines. Start capacitors, run capacitors, and contactors are all items that will fail (especially the outdoor unit) and cost under $7 each. The HVAC repairman will charge you $70 each for those parts, and $400 for a few minutes installation. Open yours up and just buy them now so when they fail (always middle of summer heat) you can just put new ones in immediately.

Even blowers and fans are inexpensive ($150) to do it yourself.

Now messing with refrigerants or natural gas; call someone.

The water heater has an aluminum or magnesium anode rod to prevent corrosion. That will dissolve after several years. They sell them at the big box hardware store; they screw right in.

vidanay2• 7 years ago

This hit home for me when I was working in a factory that made drinking cups for the fast food industry. Millions of dollars worth of equipment to make plastic cups, and then a huge warehouse to store them. All for a product that has a useful life expectancy somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes.

milancurcic3• 7 years ago

When I asked a Starbucks barista to fill my coffee cup (now empty) with water, it didn't compute. He insisted that I should get a fresh cup with a lid and straw and all just for water. It took a few back and forths but in the end he agreed to reuse it.

Small changes in procedures and behavior in the food and bev industry would go a long way with reducing waste. I think most customers would welcome it. But I guess this goes back to the original problem: Making a new cup is cheaper than reusing the existing one. Perhaps a waste tax or reuse tax credit for businesses are needed to move forward.

C14L• 7 years ago

That's actually how Amazon promotes "Alexa as Xmas gift" here in my city (Germany). For people who don't want anything but you still feel you need to buy them something.

I think we (as a society) urgently need to adjust our "gift giving" culture.

juskrey• 7 years ago

That all gives work to other people

MikusR• 7 years ago

Like single use syringes, bandages, tissue paper.

WalterBright2• 7 years ago

Jerry Seinfeld did a great comedy routine on this. He said that the stages of purchase are:

1. open box, put it on the table

2. put it in the closet

3. move it to the garage

4. move it to the storage unit

5. take it to the dump

He argued that Amazon should offer a shipping option to shortcut all this - just have it shipped directly to the dump!

drdeadringer• 7 years ago

I've been in the Freecycle community for over a decade.

I recently joined the local "Buy Nothing" community.

I am fortunate enough to live a block away from a donation center [though NextDoor members will go out of their way to tell you their opposite opinion].

Yes, I can do more regarding buying less stuff. I am keeping in mind being active on giving "another life" to what I am decluttering both in-house and on to others.

choward• 7 years ago

One of the worst gifts that people like to give are surveillance devices that's are at the $20-$30 price point like the Amazon Echo or the Google Home. These are devices that I and others I know wouldn't take for free. So they end up getting regifted or thrown out.

Please don't by technology gifts for people unless you really know what they want.

gok2• 7 years ago

The core problem here is really "free" returns. There's a nasty feedback loop: consumers return things more often, so sellers make items junkier and junkier because their margins keep shrinking.

skizm• 7 years ago

With clothes and shoes though, I won’t even consider buying if there are no free returns. The sizing is too different from brand to brand.

a3n2• 7 years ago

The sizing is different even within a brand, if they source from different factories. I bought two pairs of jeans from Amazon, same size and model of a pair I already had and fit well. All three were different effective sizes.

gok2• 7 years ago

That's fine, just be aware that a good portion of what you're paying goes to making and shipping "wrong size" clothes that will typically end up getting thrown away immediately.

rb8082• 7 years ago

Many items in the <$30 price range will cost a lot of money to ship it back, let alone the time and effort to process at both ends. Its more efficient just to give away or even throw away yourself, but returning gives you a credit so that is what most people do.

airnomad• 7 years ago

Just gift people books.

coldcode• 7 years ago

Like this is anything new. Monte Testaccio is an artificial hill in Rome composed almost entirely of broken and abandoned pottery. A huge amount of effort and cost went into creating amphorae elsewhere to ship stuff in (often olive oil) which was then worthless for reuse so it was tossed out. Today we have a lot more things to toss out, but the economics is similar. It's often cheaper to throw away than to ship it elsewhere. I always wonder how much packing material alone is tossed out.

JoeAltmaier4• 7 years ago

Clothing - I'm not getting excited about this. Every year, every big game, there're T-shirts printed with the winning team, before the game. So they print two versions. The team that doesn't win, their T-shirt is bundled up and put on a cargo ship in enormous bales and sent to someplace overseas where they sell for a penny or two. Or for fuel, or for the cotton to recycle.

Clothes are often made in large automated factories. Insisting some human beings manually examine, clean, press and repackage clothing to avoid 'waste' is the opposite of a good idea. Its enormous cost to the economy, and indirectly to the environment.

lnsru• 7 years ago

“Clothes are often made in large automated factories” <- are you sure about this? Normally clothes for all brands are manufactured manually in cheap labor countries ignoring all safety and environmental factors except few luxury local brands.

burlesona• 7 years ago

The entire story fits in the subhead: Cheaper for businesses to just toss returns than check if they can be resold.

The easiest way to change that would be to make disposal more expensive. Start a land filling tax (and/or a carbon tax, which would hit incinerators), and suddenly a lot of these businesses would run the numbers and say “never mind, let’s actually process the returns.” Or alternatively they’d say, “hmm we can’t make free shipping free returns work anymore,” which I think is also fine.

crazygringo2• 7 years ago

First of all, there are zero hard numbers here. Are we talking about 50% of returns being sent to landfills, or 1%? How does it compare with unsold merchandise? Or against waste from packaging, or disposible products in general like plastic water bottles? And even if a lot of returns aren't resold -- how many are still donated vs. discarded? It's completely unclear if this is really a priority to focus on or a distraction from bigger problems.

It's certainly not universal because where I shop online, I often see a size+color briefly come "back in stock" because it had sold out but one was returned. I've snagged desired items a few times that way -- and seen it go back out of stock after my order went through because it really was the only one left.

But second... the article isn't suggesting a clear solution here. You can't tell people to just keep the items they don't want, because there's no way to verify they're telling the truth, so you have to make them ship items back. For high-value items that are guaranteed to sell, it always makes economic sense to hire someone to inspect and restock the items. But for low-value items where it actually costs more to inspect and restock than the item is wholesale, it's just rational business.

I don't think the issue here is returns, it's waste period. The full environmental cost of producing and disposing of products needs to be included in original retail prices. Then, companies will be rationally incentivized to re-sell or donate items rather than dispose of them.

morsch• 7 years ago

In Germany, according to one study, approximately 4% of returns are destroyed. 12 to 16% items are returned in the first place. On the one hand, the resulting overall quota is very low, on the other hand that's still a very large number in absolute terms (19 million items).

Source: https://www.zeit.de/2019/25/retouren-amazon-onlinehandel-mue...

jpambrun• 7 years ago

"it's just rational business" yes and that's why we need gouvernement to step in and change the cost-benefit equation so that it becomes "just rational business" re-value these items.

barrkel• 7 years ago

Costs of production, for things likes clothes especially, are very cheap; the value is in marketing and branding. With fashion, what you buy is effectively a tag that lets you cash in on some of the cachet of the brand's advertising spend and the image it portrays.

The actual goods are very secondary, and are increasingly poor quality. Designer shirts I buy these days rip in the elbows and fray at the collar in less than 40 wears or so; jeans wear through at the knee at around the 100 day mark.

I would be surprised if materials and labour for production exceeded £10 on a typical £100 shirt or jeans.

rjkennedy98• 7 years ago

I work in returns at a very large e-tail company, and there are a few things that should be mentioned here:

1. Shipping damages are a huge reason why items have to be junked. Cardboard boxes are not meant to last long. Its rare for an item to go through more than a few shipments without needing to be completely re-boxed. I wish everyone could see the boxes that get sent back to our returns warehouses, sometimes you'd think these boxes have been purposefully destroyed.

2. Luxury brands are very strict about re-sale of items on discount sites. The explicitly prevent companies from re-selling their items on clearance.

3. Items do get sent to charity.

4. There is a huge cost involved in processing returns which means that items that could be re-sold often get junked or liquidated. Its great in theory to talk about re-selling used jackets, but someone has to process that item, ship that item, and buy that item at a cost that makes it worth it. Warehouse space is limited. Why would I use that space to keep used goods, when I can keep items that will make me more profit.

dfox• 7 years ago

As for variously damaged boxes in transit, there are two reasons:

1) many logistics processes (even inside e-retail companies) are designed around packaging that should survive being sent through normal post/package service (ie. "fragile" means "may not survive fall from 3 means, but should survive fall from 1 meters", "this way up" markings are ignored, etc.) and not around generally more fragile retail-level single item packages.

2) Even if retailer repacks the products into reasonably sturdy transport packaging, often there is either insufficient (usually due to operator error/inexperience) or outright none (in some cases by design of the process) inner padding.

This comes from the fact that packing everything completely correctly is expensive, both financially and in terms of the environmental cost (all the packaging material will be thrown away, period) so it tends to done in terms of experience with how bad the packaging can be before the amount of returns due to shipping damage out-weights the savings in packaging costs.

ken• 7 years ago

Re #1: I've bought electronics like this on eBay for 1/3 the price of a new one. The box looks like someone tried to play hockey with it but the item inside is perfectly fine. If electronics can survive, clothing and other items certainly can.

#2 sounds plausible, but there are only so many luxury brands in the world. I bet lots of companies want to believe that they're luxury brands, and destroy returned merchandise to attempt to maintain this, but really aren't.

Re #4: How can we make it worth it? Couldn't they just drop a bunch of returned products on a pallet, and sell the lot for a fixed price? There's plenty of sellers on eBay/Craigslist with seemingly infinite time to sort and resell items like this. I bet if any clothing store in the city posted "$250 for 1 cubic meter of the latest returned clothing items from the internet, unspecified quality/quantity, you pick up", it'd be gone in an hour, every time.

wiseleo• 7 years ago

That’s commonly done. There are players like bulq.com who cater to eBay sellers who buy pallets of returns untested and unseen.

paulgerhardt• 7 years ago

Manufacturer's perspective. If you're looking for business opportunities, something with a huge schlep blindness quotient[1], if you love adversarial thinking, then you'll love 'Reverse Logistics'. Also maybe if you're a politician looking to score some jobs for your district.

The basic economic lever is simple with implications that go far: it costs more to process a returned good than the value one could accrue from reselling it because returned goods need to be processed three times while regular goods only need to be processed once. If 3% of your shipped goods are returned you are making a healthy profit. If 10% are returned you are breaking even. If 20% are returned you are going under. Goods are usually manufactured at 25% their retail cost and businesses have overhead that profit needs to cover.

A lot of the return cost is additional labor and shipping. If you can minimize transport (sort returns at local factories/DCs rather than shipping back to China) and minimize cost of processing returns with low-skill labor (say supplementing with high resolution cameras/scales/machine learning inspection by comparing your 'returned' good against thousands of known good versions of your good) one could tackle this. Laws would help in that they would force product designers to push to more assembly and less fabrication steps and fewer steps overall.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html

falcolas• 7 years ago

A good topic to post a contentious viewpoint on:

This is simply an extension of the current "a company exists only to bring shareholders profit" viewpoint. Why resell returned purchases when it's cheaper to destroy them and claim a tax break on them?

Why sell robust toys, tools, clothing, etc. when it's cheaper to sell expensive pieces of "minimum viable product" that needs to be replaced every year.

Even when the cost is an unsustainable long-term business (not to mention long-term environmental and social impact), so long as the executives and shareholders profit from their short-term investment in the company they all shrug their shoulders and move on to the next ephemeral business.

Do you remember when you were regarded as a customer by a big brand - as an equal who had a relationship with that brand - instead of a consumer? It's been a long time for me.

acroback• 7 years ago

The amount of wastage I see in online store returns is mind boggling.

I recently ordered something from a manufacturer on Amazon. After couple of days, they dropped price on product by $20. So I called up Amazon for price adjustment. I was politely asked to return it to manufacturer and order a new one.

Seriously, Amazon cannot work with manufacturers to just refund price difference instead of returning the product and ordering it again. It is wasteful at so many levels.

crazygringo2• 7 years ago

Price adjustments are actually a fascinating area.

Because on the one hand, anyone can get a "de facto" price adjustment by buying a new one, keeping the old one, and returning the new one as the old one.

Now if consumers all actually did this and shipping were offered free for consumers, you'd see every company offering price adjustments within the return window, just so they could save on the shipping and handling they'd otherwise be paying for.

But in reality, a lot of consumers won't go through the hassle because it's not worth it in the end, or just too annoying. In that case, a company can save a lot more money by not offering price adjustments -- clearly Amazon's strategy here.

The most profitable strategy for any particular company on any particular product category can be either of these or somewhere in the middle. Which is why, even for companies that offer price adjustments, they're often predicated on a shorter time window (1 week instead of 60 days), only being on merchandise that was originally full-price (so you can go from 0% discount to 40%, but not 20% to 40%), or other exclusions which result in the most profitable overall balance.

It's kind of fun stuff to get into, actually.

carapace• 7 years ago

Just to point out, all the technology needed to do something better is already worked out. We just need social/political will (or whatever) to fully implement it. We have e.g. biodegradable or reusable plastic, etc., and could make all these items in a sustainable way.

The bigger challenge is converting our systems. E.g. Here in San Francisco our water comes from Hetch Hetchy about 200 miles away. There is very little public awareness (yet) that this is the kind of thing that will have to change if we're going to live in harmony with Nature.

I've been toying with the idea of trying to create a new town somewhere along holistic lines but personally I'm a recluse and I don't actually want to deal with the social stuff that would entail.

So instead, I'm building robots that can arrange and glue small pieces of material together to create larger laminated/aggregated building material. (Image search "timbrel vault"[1] and imagine little spidery machines making those out of irregular bits of {wood,metal,plastic,etc} placed and aligned with CV+ML. Or consider the agglutinated shells of certain amoebae[2].)

I imagine a sort of distributed inside-out factory that "eats" landfill and "poops" new resources.

(I just got my servos yesterday!)

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timbrel+vault&t=ffcm&atb=v60-1&iax...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testate_amoebae

t34543• 7 years ago

Better than being resold - with rampant return fraud these items can be sold as new and cost 3 shipping trips to make it right.

someonehere• 7 years ago

I bought a Casper mattress when they first came to market. My SO and I needed a new mattress and decided we would take them up on their 90 day return offer.

After the second night, my SO complained her neck was hurting so we contacted the return people. They said they would send someone to pick up the mattress from us.

Next day a 1800 Junk showed up and the guys threw it in the back. Essentially after two days of use it went in the landfill (I assume). So I learned to be skeptical of offers of free returns on items that touch the body.

In the end we found that the NovaFoam mattress from Costco was better for us and it was less expensive.

terrycody• 7 years ago

No rude or discriminate, but I think it would be much better to send these returns to the 3rd party countries like India or China, isn't it a win-win solution?

Returned online purchases often sent to landfill

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