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.".
