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Returned online purchases often sent to landfill
- zmzrr 7y 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?
- esotericn 7y agoYou can do whatever you want. Other people are free to have opinions of you. Destroying something that someone could use is a dick move.
- zmzrr 7y agoIf you click the links you will see they want to outlaw it.
- esotericn 7y agoThey'll be socially punished for doing so, but they can still do it. No-one is going to prison over this. We're talking about a businesses' practices, not an individual.
- zmzrr 7y agoI insist that you read the link: https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/amazon-france-under-fire-for-destroying-unsold-goods-1.4252787 https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/amazon-france-under-fire-for...
- esotericn 7y agoCould you explain how it is not consistent with what I've said? Also, what's the deal with posting an entirely different link?
- Vomzor 7y ago> "In the coming months a law will be passed in parliament that will outlaw this type of activity. Companies like Amazon will no longer be able to throw away products that can still be used," Poirson said. I think op is talking about businesses being able to do what they want with their products.
- VeninVidiaVicii 7y agoThe problem is more about disposal and not ownership -- throwing things away that never get used just makes pointless trash.
- esotericn 7y agoRight. 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__ 7y agoYou 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 7y agoWe, 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.
- clarry 7y agoLast 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.
- hprotagonist 7y agoThis is a good chance to plug for https://wornwear.patagonia.com/ 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 7y agoSo, 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...
- hprotagonist 7y agoThey can be quite worn. The pricing is scaled relative to how comparatively worn an item is.
- Alex3917 7y agoThey 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.
- mattkrause 7y agoThat doesn’t seem totally implausible to me, but even if it were, couldn’t they also just reuse the motor (etc) in a new housing?
- 7y ago
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y agoTime for the bay to disrupt online returns?
- jacquesm 7y agoThat's already happened in some places: https://www.buybay.com/ https://www.buybay.com/
- Havoc 7y agoYup - 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
- nashashmi 7y agoI find the discount is little and the drawback is high
- rahimnathwani 7y agoI 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.
- Havoc 7y agoYeah 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.
- dredmorbius 7y agoThis makes an interesting counterpoint to "Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21786747 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.
- esotericn 7y 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.
- coding123 7y agoNo 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.
- esotericn 7y agoI think that the society with no copyright law is better, so I'd give up Dexter for it. It's erroneous to just picture the same world with paid media missing and nothing else sprouting up.
- clarry 7y agoIndeed, and I think that those who want Dexter should figure something out between themselves and whoever can produce Dexter for them, instead of imposing laws that affect everyone in the country or world (including those who want to have nothing to do with Dexter). I'm sure if enough people want Dexter and are willing to pay for it, they'll get it, even without copyright law.
- madengr 7y agoShows you how much the stuff actually costs to manufacture when it is just thrown away. Probably just sweatshop labor costs and shipping.
- iguy 7y agoYup. 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.
- madengr 7y agoI 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.
- iguy 7y agoYea I bet those don't have 70% margins. I also bet you know which size to buy when you go back the next year, instead of having to figure out again what shape everybody is making jeans this year.
- Marsymars 7y agoI pay about 100% of the purchase price of shirts at Costco to get them tailored. The economics feel weird, but I haven’t found a better overall deal on everyday shirts for work.
- jhrkjweh 7y agoLook 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 https://www.gq.com/story/the-best-puffer-jackets
- kevsim 7y 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.
- nashashmi 7y agoRemove the stitched brand then?
- shantly 7y agoIt’s kinda the title feature of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
- tyingq 7y agoIn 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.
- Marsymars 7y agoOh 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.
- 7y ago
- jacquesm 7y agoIt'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.
- jodrellblank 7y agothey are clueless about what a real gift would be like What would a real gift be like?
- jacquesm 7y agoSomething that you actually use and that stays around for a while.
- esotericn 7y agoAt 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.
- jodrellblank 7y agoI had thought this would just be intuitively obvious to anyone Nothing is intuitively obvious, nothing is common sense, except maybe the UX quip about babies and breast feeding; that's a style of comment which is mostly a superiority boast. There's a common saying along the lines of "buy once, buy for life" but pushback against it recently suggesting "buy the cheapest thing which will do, if you turn out to use it often enough to break it then consider buying a decent one". Stocking filler plastic tat might be enough to learn whether you have any interest in {jump rope, juggling, yo-yo, growing an indoor plant}.
- gok 7y agoThe 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 7y agoWith 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.
- a3n 7y agoThe 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.
- gok 7y agoThat'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.
- rb808 7y agoMany 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 7y agoJust gift people books.
- coldcode 7y agoLike 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.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoClothing - 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 7y 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 7y agoThe 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.
- crazygringo 7y agoFirst 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 7y agoIn 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-muellproduktion-paketversand https://www.zeit.de/2019/25/retouren-amazon-onlinehandel-mue...
- jpambrun 7y 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.
- williesleg 7y agoThe Government's Purpose is to deal with garbage correctly. So sick of this shit. See straws in turtles? Blame YOUR government. They aren't doing the right thing.
- barrkel 7y agoCosts 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.
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- rjkennedy98 7y agoI 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.
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- dfox 7y agoAs 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 7y agoRe #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.
- paulgerhardt 7y agoManufacturer'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 http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
- falcolas 7y agoA 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 7y agoThe 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.
- crazygringo 7y agoPrice 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 7y agoJust 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=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timbrel+vault&t=ffcm&atb=v60-1&iax... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testate_amoebae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testate_amoebae
- t34543 7y agoBetter than being resold - with rampant return fraud these items can be sold as new and cost 3 shipping trips to make it right.
- Proven 7y ago> Cheaper for businesses to just toss returns than check if they can be resold: Adria Vasil I just read the first 2-3 paragraphs to see if TFA has a socialist and statist slant (yes it does). So it's cheaper for businesses to dump returns than to take them back. And where's the freaking customer in all that? Is it cheaper for them, too? Do they not return products knowing they'll end up in a landfill? Could they not buy unless they wanted to risk creating unnecessary pollution? The article is crap.
- someonehere 7y agoI 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 7y agoNo 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?