>The person who ordered the item would get to keep the product and receive a refund
Everyone seems to be ignoring this part. Retailers have adopted a new "just keep it" return policy[1]. Which is pretty obviously causing this fraud. "Item never arrived" can be fixed by adding $1 to the shipping label to force a signature
With no bad intent - about 80% of my Target returns are "just keep it", about 10% for Walmart and 0% for Amazon. But I have neighbors with about 50% on Amazon. No idea how the algorithms work but perhaps these groups have also figured that part out.
Stop the "just keep it", require some sort of security on delivery (lock box, signature) and this problem disappears overnight
> "Item never arrived" can be fixed by adding $1 to the shipping label to force a signature
In my experience, drivers will sign for and leave "signature required" deliveries quite a lot of the time. I've had signature-required international shipments worth thousands of dollars signed for by the driver and left sitting in front of my house.
`Getting a signature` is very 1900s. I'd expect to see more like what Amazon do for various high-value packages (maybe even high-fraud), you are given a code which has to be verified by the delivery driver before they will give you the code.
As you say, makes delivery more expensive, as the drivers can no longer just leave packages and makes the interaction longer (+ more redelivery required).
"Forcing a signature" doesn't work with throw-and-go delivery. In the common best case, someone is home and takes a few minutes to get to the door. In the average case, nobody answers and it needs to be redelivered several days in a row. Making this more efficient would require redesigning last mile delivery to include scheduled time windows, buffering packages per-recipient, etc.
In the early 2000's I was adjacent to a company designing a locking box that delivery services would have the code to and leave packages in. I don't think this went anywhere because it was too far ahead of its time, but I could see Amazon encouraging something like this for customers in problematic areas (weren't/aren't they trying something with being able to open your garage door?).
IME whether you need to return something really depends on the item and why. If it's damaged grocery items from Target/Walmart/Chewy, nobody really wants them back. Whereas Amazon invariably wants the stuff back through their automated solution, but talking to someone (which I only do for exceptional cases) seems to invariably result in "just keep it" and a refund. I'm sure there is some surveillance-based solution behind this, deciding based on social credit score and whatnot. My only questions are how singular it is (eg Retail Equation), and when that dystopian hammer is finally going to drop.
"Amazon lockers" are at places other than your home. So unless they're somewhere you're already going to be going, at the right time, for other reasons, that option is much less convenient. Especially if your other plans change and you now need to go out of your way to get your package.
But Amazon offers lockers for apartment communities. It's not a public locker, but if something gets shipped to your address it automatically ends up in the locker. This is very convenient, but the fact that it's offered shows how dominant their position is
And how much would it cost in terms of delivery time? For me it's really all about it.
Your delivery service costs $1B per year with the current throughput (without considering peaks etc.). Imagine now adding those constraints such as signature: it means that for each package you add another 1-2-3 minutes at least. For 100 packages a day it's almost 2 hours. With a salary of 7$ per hour = 14$ per day just to have signatures. And that's 100 packages, which is probably a joke for a delivery person.
14$ per day = almost 5K per year. Basically 700K is peanuts.
The problem of course starts when everyone believes "oh I am smarter than you, I can also do it". And then you lose not 700K but 50 millions or more.
Another way is to build up your own delivery company, measure performance of the delivery people (with feedback) and fire/sue them when you notice a continuous loss of packages and reward the good ones.
I also never had Amazon tell me to just keep it. Even some small $5-$10 item I scuff at driving to the UPS store.
Walmart often tells me to keep $5-$10 items despite the fact I have Walmart+, they are often in the neighborhood and happy to leave it outside for pickup.
This is interesting feedback. I wonder if Amazon takes it back so they can resell to recyclers? Still, I struggle to think if this makes sense. Or maybe they are trying to discourage no-return scams.
It's too costly to ship the item back. For small items this is a no brainer, and for very large items as well. There's a sweet spot where the return cost not so high as to kill the profit and the item can still be resold - packaged electronics come to mind.
It's this kind of garbage bs that makes it hard for me to get a refund for a legitimate problem I'm having with a product. I want to be all "Yeah! Stick it to em!" but the general population suffers because of this too. Amazon used to be great about refunds, letting you keep cheap things because they weren't worth sending back. Now they want me to send back even the smallest most insignificant things.
It’s not because of scammers like these. The loss for them is minuscule compared to their revenue. It goes much deeper.
Amazon is being less generous with customers because they’re an aging company built around a technology solution (automated listing, searching, and service) that couldn’t actually satisfy global scale in the face of automated listing spam; because they’ve largely won as many customers as they ever will and have few radical growth avenues; and because now they’re facing these challenges in a world where money is much more expensive and needs to be more carefully allocated.
Amazon’s giving you grief with your refunds because their whole 2000’s-era style of online retail is past it’s peak and is starting to crumble beneath its titans, just like search is for Google and graph-centered social media did Facebook.
While we can hope exciting new retail approaches take hold, the experience with Amazon is only going to get worse, regardless of little scams like this.
I'm guessing it's because they have UPS stores consolidating returns into bigger boxes, which reduces the return cost per item. Then the returns get packed into pallets which are sold.
They sent me the wrong item, and now I not only don't have the item I ordered, but have to take a trip to the UPS store to send this thing back. Extremely frustrating!
I also received an item that was shattered in transit and had to send it back. I felt bad for the UPS store employee dealing with the broken glass.
Be extremely careful and document everything - this happened to me with Amazon when I ordered a high end graphics card, and got an empty box. They said to send it back, but when they got it, forgot all about the part where I said the item was missing and claimed I didn’t complete the return.
Then they claimed to my credit card company I never requested a return.
Then they told the state AG that they had accepted my return when I filed a complaint (perjury!)
This website's automatic "subscribe" popup/prompt, which appeared in the center of the screen, covered all content, and had "404" in the middle of it, made me think I had clicked a broken link. Awful design.
I agree. With noscript enabled I could not see anything but this popup, and the giant 404 in it made me think for a second that the article didn't exist anymore or was behind a paywall.
Speaking of refunds, has anyone been able to wrap their head around how it's possible that the generous/overused return dynamic has continued to be sustainable? It seems that retailers frankly just don't care about the level of returns, whether it's routinely packing things terribly to make a ball mill that damages items, or playing price games that directly create more returns - eg Amazon's continually volatile prices that encourage clicking buy and then deciding 30 days later, or Home Depot's combo deals that result in half the combo being predictably returned.
At this point I would have thought retailers would have fixed their own shipping processes to pack things so they're less likely to get destroyed. But nope, the best I've found is to break up orders on my end, assuming I don't forget and the shipping minimums allow. I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop and retailers to start "cracking down" somehow. It seems like the classic Silicon Valley approach where they set up a poor process, planned to make it up on volume, and now have no visibility into the actual problems causing inefficiency. But yet somehow it's still working out financially.
The best I've been able to figure is that price fixing ("minimum advertised price") keeps margins high enough that retailers can eat multiple shipping costs, and retailers have gotten manufacturers to eat the cost of "defective items", creating at least a stable situation (although an inefficient one). But it still boggles my mind, especially seeing the trade in bulk pallets of returned goods, which makes it seem like many new condition resellable items still end up being considered salvage.
my bet is on tax shenanigans. The $100 item costs us $108 due to sales tax, it cost the seller $40-$60 to produce, but it only costs them $20-$40 (possibly more) for a refund because they can write off the loss.
That doesn't make sense. In general, "write offs" just means subtracting a cost from profit, along with the cost they pay for the items that are successfully sold. (Unless you know some special tax result that allows them to deduct more than the price of the damaged item)
I'd guess it's something to do with the margin being much much higher than we imagine. Like it's sold for $100, but it only costs $10-$20 incremental cost to produce. Hence why I'd think the manufacturer would be eating returns, because that allows them to keep their margin higher.
The way credit cards put the burden of refund fraud on the seller enables a fair amount of this. I lost an appeal on a chargeback even after I hired a "task rabbit" type person to take a photo of the item sitting in the buyer's shop window. A custom-made item that was very clearly the item claimed as "did not arrive", in a window, with the customer's street address visible in the same photo. Accompanied with Google Street view pictures and links corroborating the location.
So, often, sellers just refund these because they know fighting it is fruitless. Oh, and you get to pay a chargeback fee on top of losing the item value and cost of shipping if you choose to fight and lose.
This is known as "the cost of doing business" and used to be baked into business models. Granted, business models have changed significantly with the rise of the internet and direct individual sales, so maybe it's time for a change. As long as that change still protects consumers from larger businesses with the edge against them.
Larger businesses can afford to simply ban someone for eternity for a chargeback.
Also, if fraud is a cost of doing business, then that society is going to start wasting a lot of resources and be less productive than societies with less fraud.
From what I understand by reading around (I'm not from the US) petty theft in some areas causes already the problem you're mentioning for offline businesses as well.
It is. I live in NYC and stopped going to CVS late at night because there is such a looter problem in my neighborhood, I can't buy shit at that time. The looters are there with bags ransacking the isles while I wait behind hoping they leave what I came to buy. Sometimes if it's locked then they can't take that but so still have to wait for them being done to go through the isle lol.
I wonder why they keep those stores open sometimes.
Throughout most of the rest of the country CVS and Walgreens are shuttering all over the place and are blaming it on theft. I have my doubts about theft being the culprit, but my nearest CVS is 20 minutes away, and there used to be 3 between here and there (likely the real reason they are closing them).
Not OP, but when I lived at 123rd and Lex, the A&P was looted constantly. Like OP, I just stood back and hoped they didn't go after my staples (beans, rice, spices).
FiDi. Only after dark (never seen it during the day), and not all of the pharmacies get hit as bad. There is like a million pharmacies around and I've only seen one closed so it can't be that bad, but damn it's annoying. Like, can you leave one bottle of shampoo please?
It doesn't make it less ridiculous, and doesn't change the incentives it sets up. Since the losses are spread across a bunch of (often small) businesses, scenarios like this where the crime goes unresearched are the norm.
I'm not asking for sympathy here, I'm explaining why it's a free for all. It would be fairly easy for the credit card companies to aggregate the data and revoke cards from these people (when there's a pattern) because they have that visibility. Or, if revocation is too hard, give me back a "return fraud risk score" when I do a pre-auth....even if said score has a very high threshold before it shows. But they have no reason to, because it doesn't hurt them in any way.
You could have efficient legal systems to take care of companies that defraud their customers. And then use payment methods that do not allow chargebacks (And don't cost more than 0.01$ per transaction.)
The current legal system allows a business to take a customer to court after a customer issues a chargeback and the business loses.
I'm actually surprised businesses don't do it more often as a deterrent. At a minimum, they could go win a few easy cases, then tell future customers threatening chargebacks about those cases and the outcome.
They could send a simple letter saying "We see you have initiated a chargeback against us. After investigation, we believe this chargeback not to have any merit. In cases of false chargebacks, it is our policy to take clients to court to reclaim our costs, which in past cases have averaged $X on top of the value of the goods.".
I did call them, they were in a different state. They were sympathetic, but honest in that this sort of thing doesn't hit their minimum level of interest to do anything with.
From what I've read (quickly) they are considered commercial interstate carriers so mail fraud laws still apply.
Even if it goes no where legally, them getting an investigative phone call from their AG might be enough to deter future scamming, or maybe even convince voluntarily pay you back.
Either way, good luck! (Btw, have you seen that service where you can mail order cow dung? Just sayin')
As far as I know, banks are the ones that handle disputes between a legitimate buyer and seller, while the card processor (Visa/MC) only handles fraud disputes. Depending on how much that person spends on their card, the bank might honor their chargeback regardless of the circumstances because they don't want to lose all future business of that one person.
Just gonna end up making it harder for the rest of us to return our crap. This is an organized theft setup, not some random Joe trying to get a heater for the winter because his furnace gave out.
Like the other person said, I never said Amazon was a saint. And guess what: stuff breaks. It happens. Returns are necessary. Making them even harder to do helps nobody. I wish decent brick and mortar stores weren't getting stomped on too, but this approach to "fighting the man" isn't going to have the effect you think it will.
Avoidance is not evasion, and equating it with stealing in this context is fruitless.
One could claim it is legalized theft via political corruption, but Amazon alone did not write the rules, and it does not seem relevant to a situation where businesses have to change policies/increase prices/reduce offerings due to theft.
Refusing to give you something of mine is not taking something of yours.
There would also be less refusal in the first place if taxes were actually proportional to the percentage of public services you use, but some people are against paying their fair share.
> but some people are against paying their fair share.
You're right, but you also left it as an exercise to the reader about who the "some people" are. Those "some people" are mostly large corporate entities, like Amazon, that do all sorts of tricks to keep their losses inside the US and their gains outside the US so they can avoid paying taxes on income that was made from US consumers. While I'm more anti-tax than the average person, it's important to understand that anything which sends US consumer spending outside the US en masse is ultimately a detriment to the US society because it enriches other countries while depriving the US of that money continue to flow through the economic cycle. Dead money sitting in accounts in Ireland, Cayman Islands, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Macau reduce the velocity of money in the US and directly contribute to economic slowdowns as well as increasing income inequality within the US society.
It's the biggest reason why, despite being relatively anti-tax, I'm also very much pro buying things made in the US, locally if possible, because it's important that a dollar coming into the community gets spent many times over in the same community to actually improve community welfare. As soon as that dollar exits the community, it's likely lost.
The fair share is proportional to your use of the service. That’s means the USPS model, not the income tax model. Many people are against adopting the USPS model for other public services because they do not want to pay their fair share.
Everyone seems to be ignoring this part. Retailers have adopted a new "just keep it" return policy[1]. Which is pretty obviously causing this fraud. "Item never arrived" can be fixed by adding $1 to the shipping label to force a signature
With no bad intent - about 80% of my Target returns are "just keep it", about 10% for Walmart and 0% for Amazon. But I have neighbors with about 50% on Amazon. No idea how the algorithms work but perhaps these groups have also figured that part out.
Stop the "just keep it", require some sort of security on delivery (lock box, signature) and this problem disappears overnight
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/26/business/retail-returns/index...