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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 hav
by rjkennedy98 7y 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 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.