Use It or Lose It | Free Returns

Hello friend!

The days are getting shorter, night is near, we don’t have much time, let’s get right to it:

When you return something, it doesn’t just go back to the shelf.

It goes:

Other places.

Like the landfill or a massive incinerator designed to burn trash for electricity or maybe the back of a store where it sits for months before going on a few different trucks to eventually get to the landfill or the trash fire.

And good lord we made an entire episode about all the issues with returns, released just in time for The Holidays. More on that in about a hundred words. But first:

This is an extra special episode, because it marks our first collaboration with internet historian and YouTube sensation Danny Gonzalez. And Danny was nice enough to:

1. Let us come near him and his house to film a portion of our episode.

2. Make his own, much more emotionally-taxing video on his channel about what happens to returns. And if you don’t already know, his channel’s a downright fun place full of other great videos like this one about tech products that shouldn’t exist (that’s the title, not us saying that, but we do think he’s right).

And as always, if you’re running out of pre-purchased emails, you can find the unsubscribe button higher in the scroll than any local garden center or tech trends newsletter would dare.

For the rest of you:

Free & Easy

As we continue our for-profit, corporate-approved societal decay, there are fewer and fewer “good deals” out there for consumers. Sure, you still have the big three:

1. Walking (on approved public pathways)

2. Costco

3. Looking around (Don’t push it, though)

But if you dare need to buy something from a publicly-traded company (not Costco), you can pretty much rest assured you’ll be getting the bare minimum for the highest price, as part of that corporation’s ethical duty to maximize shareholder value.

But there is one modern shopping feature that somehow slipped through the board room cracks:

Free returns.

To get your refund, you used to have to go to THE STORE and go toe-to-toe with Nintendo-trained return hawks (preserved here by intrepid YouTuber Randy Cornetta):

But that was before THE INTERNET.

Now you don’t have to go anywhere NEAR the store and you can return stuff any time in the next 30 days or 90 days or one year or whenever you want. You can send whatever you just bought back to the shelves and get 100% of your money back, no questions asked.

Seems too good to be true? Well, you’re an idiot. Because it is true!

• Buyer’s remorse? Not anymore, pal. Back it goes. And feel free to repeat as needed.

• Don’t know what size or color pants you want? Order them all, then return the 19 pairs you don’t like. This is very common and is known in the returns world as “bracketing.”

• But then why even buy clothes? Order whatever you want, wear it, and then return it. This is also very common (known as “wardrobing”).

And it’s these kinds of bullet points that lead to over 20% of everything we buy online getting returned. When you add in brick and mortar retail, Americans are projected to return almost ONE TRILLION DOLLARS worth of items in 2024 alone.

But the retail industry largely sees this as a necessary tradeoff, as described here by Amanda Mull, who’s done a ton of good reporting on this for The Atlantic:

Free returns are what encourage people to tolerate bad product listings, misleading stock images, poor quality control, and the days-long wait for something they might have once run out to pick up in less than an hour. Remove the no-fee keystone, and the entire facade of convenience might fall. No one likes having to manage their own miniature nonprofit reverse-logistics business out of their home in order to send back all the stuff they bought that didn’t live up to their expectations. You’d probably like it even less if you were routinely paying for the privilege. Right now e-commerce giants seem to be betting that they’ve killed off enough brick-and-mortar competition that you’ll have to do it anyway.

But what does it mean to return something?

If you read the intro, you probably already know that your return probably isn’t just going back to the shelf.

No, in this case, “return” diverges slightly from its literal definition. Picture a version of The Return of the King, where Aragorn tells everyone he’s taking his rightful place as King of Gondor, but then just goes and dies in a pile of old orcs instead. Or Return of the Jedi where Luke fakes everyone out and burns in a big incinerator to power that new Death Star. Or the 1993 Bridget Fonda action thriller Point of No Return except there really was a return. Actually scratch that last one.

Because when you shove that Pro-Ject A1 record player back in its box and send it off to a better life, it’s probably not going back to where you bought it. Instead it probably goes on a few truck rides, before arriving at:

The returns center.

A massive warehouse where all your returns go to get inspected, graded, and sorted. Think of a warehouse. Now make it bigger. You think that’s big? Try this:

Now that’s a returns center.

And a quick disclaimer before we launch ahead – companies don’t really like to talk about what happens to their returns. They’re shy! They’re embarrassed! Don’t ask! And that means the information we have access to on returns can be pretty thin. But we’ll do our best.

Inside that big rectangle there’s a legion of highly trained analysts. It’s tempting to think of them like old timey telephone switchboard operators diligently returning packages to the respective stores, but that’s not quite what they’re up to. Their job is to spend as little time as possible sorting the returns into five categories:

1. One-way trip to the landfill. Yeah, let’s rip the bandaid off now, probably between 10% and 25% of returns are sent to live at a farm upstate if you know what I’m saying. To avoid having to say they sent the returns to a landfill, sometimes companies will burn them for “energy recovery”. Again, the numbers are pretty hazy here, but it’s definitely billions and billions of dollars worth of stuff getting very much destroyed. But while this seems like a cost-saving, easy solution, it STILL involves handling and trucking the returns to the dump and also the most beloved profession at the elementary school: the garbageman. So this option can actually be pretty expensive.

2. Donate it. Amazon does a ton of this through a nonprofit called Good 360, which also handles that losing team Super Bowl merch everyone’s always talking about. But unfortunately even donations have a hard time keeping themselves out of trouble (landfill), so there’s a good chance a lot of this is still #1 with some extra (also polluting) steps.

3. Back to the shelf. This seems to be relatively rare, but if the item is in perfect condition and the seller wants to spend the time and money to restock it, your return can go back on the shelf as new. But so much needs to go right here, and there are often more than enough new, never-before-sold versions of that same product just itching to get their chance to shine (or be sold and then sent to the dump).

4. Resell it but for cheaper. Something like a laptop or big screen television whose resale value overwhelms the cost of taking it back can sometimes be repackaged and sold as an open box deal. If an item isn’t working properly and the fix is fairly minor, it can get fixed and resold as “refurbished” or “used.” These slightly discounted categories offer a way for higher value, but less than perfectly new items to get resold.

5. Liquidation. Your returned item goes on a thrilling adventure from one massive warehouse to a different massive warehouse, where it is sold for pennies on the dollar to a liquidator. That liquidator will then try to find anyone willing to roll the dice on a completely random assortment of stuff. It’s kinda like that show Storage Wars, without the potential of finding a safe full of money or someone’s Grandma Agnes’s pearl collection. No, Liquidation Wars™ would only have access to other people’s returns, retailer overstock, or anything a big company decided wasn’t worth the warehouse space. Liquidators do great work trying to find homes for would-be-trash, but as we said in the episode, they’re a bandaid on the head wound that is free returns.

And of course, all of these options come with a ton of:

Moving that sh*t around.

“In the reverse logistics world, returns go through 3-4 times as many touch points as forward goods.”

And that actually makes sense. Amazon and fast, free shipping have forced retailers to become incredibly good at getting your purchase to you ridiculously fast.

And while those expectations can be difficult for some companies, the forward journey for your future return is typically way simpler: the company has the item you bought, they send it to you through a delivery service (or ship it themselves, if they’re Amazon), then you have the item. Happy!

But the reverse journey is way more complicated and varied, with millions of packages launched back at sellers from all directions: boxes picked up at customer’s houses, boxes dropped off at delivery service locations, random returns taken back to a retail store where they get piled up in the back until there’s enough to justify shipping them to a returns center (this is known as Buy Online, Return In Store, or BORIS, which is partially intended to get you to buy stuff in the brick and mortar while you’re there to send back the thing you don’t want).

And baby, it’s not just a couple of returns. Brace yourself for some carefully selected statistics organized by three elegant, sultry bullet points:

• UPS alone ships almost THREE MILLIONS returns every day in the weeks following the holiday season in the U.S.

• In 2024, nearly 39% of online shoppers returned a purchase ONCE a MONTH.

• In the past 5 years, returns have doubled. Growth!

All of that adds up to cost around 20% to 30% of the original retail value of an item, just to complete one of these returns journeys. And with constantly degrading quality and suppressed costs of production for a lot of stuff we buy, there’s a decent chance your return costs a company more than it did to make the item in the first place. Brutal!

But there’s a TWIST that didn’t really make it into our video. Because there’s a sixth return option that’s quietly becoming more common, because it actually makes the most sense for a lot of big retailers:

You Just Keep It.

It’s called the “returnless return” and it’s sweeping the nation.

You want to return something? Don’t! Keep it and give it away or throw it in your trash or whatever you want.

Companies such as Amazon, Walmart and Target have decided some items are not worth the cost or hassle of getting back. Think a $20 T-shirt that might cost $30 in shipping and handling to recover. There are also single-use items, such as a package of plastic straws, that might be difficult to resell or medicines that could be unsafe to market again.

And to be fair, companies have been doing this for years now, with everyone following Amazon’s lead yet again. But it seems to be really going wild recently, because it actually makes terrible, terrible sense.

Let’s do some very simple and very general math:

Start with the projected $890 billion dollars of returned retail value in 2024. Then take a somewhat conservative 21% of that for returns expenses (from a Pitney Bowes report that says returns cost 21% of the retail value). That gives you: $187 billion dollars.

But this isn’t a Harvard Business School study, so we’ll take that down a notch and throw a nice maybe in the front:

Returns most likely cost U.S. retailers more than $100 billion dollars every year.

JUST TO TAKE THE RETURNS BACK AND DO SOMETHING WITH THEM. EVEN IF THEY JUST THROW THEM IN THE TRASH.

And good lord that kind of wasteful spending just doesn’t square with the corporate ethical duty to maximize profits, with the vast majority of retailers telling McKinsey & Company that “returns are a concern for profitability.”

So what if you cut out the majority returns altogether? Why that’s so crazy it just might work (make more profit).

But then there’s this nagging thought:

What will customers do if companies tell them the item they just bought is suddenly worthless?

Now, buying something and then returning it for no good reason is considered returns fraud. But this is also the free market, baby! And if you just bought a blender for $50, then almost immediately get told: it’s actually worthless, you can have your money back and keep the blender for free, who cares. Well, that’s f*cking confusing.

You might wonder if there’s a way to skip the whole dance and get right to the free blender, if that’s where we’re going anyway. But stop right there!

That would be bad for profits. Get it now?

And so we’ve officially reached the next, much more stupid and depressing, phase of corporate return policies.

An industry survey found that over half of companies now offer don’t-return returns. But they don’t want to just turn them loose on the masses, so they keep them as a hidden “perk,” hoping to identify customers who won’t take advantage of this overconsumption, profit-driven anomaly. And what a glorious “perk” it is.

One woman interviewed for this Reuters piece said she was offered a returnless return for a $300 portable AC that showed up broken. But rather than give her a chance to fix it or donate it, Amazon would only give her a refund after she proved she had cut the power cord, basically guaranteeing that return would go to the trash, just not at Amazon’s expense.

Or there’s a guy who got a king-sized comforter from Target he didn’t even order:

He called Target, which apologized for the mix up, and told him to keep it. They said, “It would be overly burdensome for us to take it back.”

But again, in the face of the high costs of returns and the often unethically low costs of production, this all makes some kind of sick sense.

It really seems like most things for sale now are basically low quality pre-trash, and no one wants them back. And if that’s the Valhalla the free market has been leading us too, maybe it’s not that cool of a place.

Official Rollie (no prize)

If you’ve never heard Jeff Bezos laugh, we are so deeply happy to be the ones to show you what it looks like. You absolutely can “hear him coming a mile away.”

It’s truly crazy, and by all accounts he’s always laughed like that. We thought it may have been an Elizabeth-Holmes-low-voice after market add-on, but apparently he’s been laughing like an absolute lunatic since the jump.

So for this edition’s Official Rollie (no prize), we ask that you scour the Internet and find what you think is the greatest laugh in existence. And then send us a link to it. We’re counting on you.

And as for the Officials Rollie (no prize) from last edition, here they are:

• Alex Campos

• Jack Johnson

How about that, friend?

---

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited by: Caroline Schaper

Art by: Laura Conte

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Matt Nelsen and Rollie Williams