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Fry's electronics when I was there was a victim of that. Fry's management in their heydays (before newegg, amazon) gave the directive to open boxes, even when t

Fry's electronics when I was there was a victim of that. Fry's management in their heydays (before newegg, amazon) gave the directive to open boxes, even when these boxes appear new, during the return-process. This is the result of lessons. Hopefully, Amazon will learn it or make it a problem for the vendors.

sjm-lbm 6y ago
At least they were doing something about it. In my younger days working retail at CompUSA, I once pointed out that a customer was attempting to return a cheaper video card in a better video card's box. I got in trouble (not much trouble, but still) for making the customer unhappy :/.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  The managers were annoyed at you for a while? How did it end
  - sjm-lbm 6y ago
    Oh, the ending wasn't super interesting. I was telling the customer that I wasn't going to process the return, they asked to get a manager - and when I obliged, the manager sided with the customer and chided me a little after they left. That's pretty much the end of it, I don't recall it coming up after that one day.
kayfox 6y ago
Fry's is the only retailer I have been to where an LP associate insisted on opening up a product I just bought new to inspect it. Yep, its a rice cooker, I should have went over to returns to return it as its condition changed from new to open box before I left the store.
- bdowling 6y ago
  > Yep, its a rice cooker A rice cooker is a cylindrical item that usually comes in a rectangular box that leaves empty room in the corners. The LP associate was checking for additional unpurchased items in the box, not that you were getting a rice cooker.
  - gruturo 6y ago
    And you could have stuffed something quite expensive inside the rice cooker
  - kayfox 6y ago
    It was a sealed box.
    - icedchai 6y ago
      There may have been some inside theft / collusion going on with employees. Example: Employee takes a rice cooker off the shelf, puts high value electronics (memory, processors, etc) inside, reseals it with shrink wrap. He tells his friend on the outside to buy the rice cooker to smuggle it out. They then split the proceeds. This probably goes on for weeks until the store wonders why they're suddenly selling so many rice cookers, but are already running low on Pentium Pros and 32 meg SIMMs.
      - kayfox 6y ago
        So, what your saying is I should expect being treated like this, after I have purchased the product, thus making it my property. I will go ahead and just go over to returns next time and go somewhere else.
        icedchai 6y ago
        I'm just guessing. I don't work in retail but I'm sure all sorts of scams happen, ones we can't even imagine. Was this recent?
- raincom 6y ago
  Yes, they are like that. However, it is mandatory for the LP to check any thing that an employee has bought. They also check lunch bags, boxes. One time, LP caught an employee who stuffed his lunch bag with lots of DVDs. Other time, the LP manager and the customer service manager (who manages the front checkouts and cash) got colluded, and switched the direction of the camera near the cash counting area; then $10K cash was gone. Both managers got fired. Another incident. One LP associate and another guy at the return counter ran a scam together by issuing store credit for things that are NOT returned. For every return there, LP associate has to sign off.
- jiveturkey 6y ago
  too bad fry's is done for. despite the problems, i miss them now. towards the end, ie the last few years, when i brought an expensive-ish item to the counter, or more often when they brought it out of the cage for me to complete the purchase, i'd open the item at the counter in front of the cashier. 100% of the time the cashier would balk "hey you can't do that" (i hadn't paid yet), which is of course stupid to say. i just needed to verify that the item was new and also not a 52-switcheroo, as we used to call it. recently (2019-2020) i've bought 2 damaged high end products from best buy. outer box perfect, inner product damaged. luckily BB is like amazon and has complete no-hassle returns. more longer ago i've received a few duds from ebay and other non-amazon retail merchants. smaller value things i just write off but some of the bigger ones it's been painful getting the rep to take it back. the next time i do such a purchase i am setting up a camera to do an unboxing video.
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    Yep I just said above I’ve started opening any non cheap purchase in front of a Ring doorbell. Have a scissor in a hidden spot above front door on the outside so I don’t get too lazy and bring the unopened box inside. I’ve only done it twice so far after getting really bad luck and back to back swapped items in May. - On the other hand, my friend who sells on eBay frequently said even if I film myself packing up, sealing, and giving the same box to UPS or post office, EBay and PayPal (if they’re still doing eBay stuff) probably won’t care and side with buyer still.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  Should have? Just because 'floor model/return' and 'only the box was touched' fall under the same umbrella doesn't mean you should treat them the same. A discount would be unreasonable, and getting your money back wouldn't improve your situation at all. Unless that was some kind of collector's item rice cooker.
- RandomBacon 6y ago
  No, you should have said "No thank you, have a great day" and keep on walking. You already bought the item and you have no duty to them for anything further. (I do this at any store that checks receipts, except for Costco, because I don't want to risk them revoking my membership. Never had a problem.)
  - mindslight 6y ago
    I don't know why you're getting downvoted, but I also don't know why anyone would stand in a line to leave a store. Just say no thanks and walk past them, like every other unwanted solicitation.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
X-ray plus machine learning could probably solve that problem quite effectively. Or tamper-resistant RFID tags attached directly to the product.
dawnerd 6y ago
I think it's pretty obvious Amazon has done the math and determined it's not worth their time to do anything about it.
ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
>Hopefully, Amazon will learn it or make it a problem for the vendors. The problem is, it'd be trivial for someone with a sticker printer to slam a new label on the drive, saying 16TB. It'd be quite unrealistic to have Amazon own the tools and perform QA testing on all the millions of items on their site. You see a similar problem with knock off headphones, even plugging them in and listening to a song wouldn't be enough to find most fakes. I think the only real solution is this to be fixed at the government level. At the moment it's too expensive and risky to go after customers, even when Amazon can determine they are running this scam. Either you get drawn into a legal battle trying to prove it, or you get labeled as evil Amazon going after the innocent little guy in the media. It's easiest for Amazon to just raise prices 1% and call it a day. Which is what Walmart does for theft/return fraud as well, and likely every company in the U.S. There needs to be a law that makes it easy for Amazon (and other companies) to go "this account was found to have returned different merchandise 5 times, they need to pay $xxxx fine" and it to be done. But if even if one of these cases go to trial, it'd be at least a $5000 expense to Amazon. As long as this is impossible in our legal system, these scammers will continue to thrive.
- sharkmerry 6y ago
  > It'd be quite unrealistic to have Amazon own the tools and perform QA testing on all the millions of items on their site. You see a similar problem with knock off headphones, even plugging them in and listening to a song wouldn't be enough to find most fakes. If amazon doesnt have capacity to verify products they are selling, they shouldnt be selling them. They are knowingly contributing to fraud and we write it off as "they're too big to regulate themselves"
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    So should most customer returns just go to a landfill?
    - LegitShady 6y ago
      Returns are sold in pallets to resellers who accept the risk. But amazon shouldnt be selling returns if they can't or haven't verified the item is correct and functional.
kodt 6y ago
I recall people doing this but just putting a NIC in there and returning it to Best Buy. The Geek Squad employee would open the box to verify a card was in there, but wouldn’t know what it should look like and would accept a $15 NIC in place of a $200 video card.

sjm-lbm 6y ago

At least they were doing something about it. In my younger days working retail at CompUSA, I once pointed out that a customer was attempting to return a cheaper video card in a better video card's box. I got in trouble (not much trouble, but still) for making the customer unhappy :/.

cutemonster 6y ago
The managers were annoyed at you for a while? How did it end
- sjm-lbm 6y ago
  Oh, the ending wasn't super interesting. I was telling the customer that I wasn't going to process the return, they asked to get a manager - and when I obliged, the manager sided with the customer and chided me a little after they left. That's pretty much the end of it, I don't recall it coming up after that one day.

kayfox 6y ago

Fry's is the only retailer I have been to where an LP associate insisted on opening up a product I just bought new to inspect it. Yep, its a rice cooker, I should have went over to returns to return it as its condition changed from new to open box before I left the store.

bdowling 6y ago
> Yep, its a rice cooker A rice cooker is a cylindrical item that usually comes in a rectangular box that leaves empty room in the corners. The LP associate was checking for additional unpurchased items in the box, not that you were getting a rice cooker.
- gruturo 6y ago
  And you could have stuffed something quite expensive inside the rice cooker
- kayfox 6y ago
  It was a sealed box.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    There may have been some inside theft / collusion going on with employees. Example: Employee takes a rice cooker off the shelf, puts high value electronics (memory, processors, etc) inside, reseals it with shrink wrap. He tells his friend on the outside to buy the rice cooker to smuggle it out. They then split the proceeds. This probably goes on for weeks until the store wonders why they're suddenly selling so many rice cookers, but are already running low on Pentium Pros and 32 meg SIMMs.
    - kayfox 6y ago
      So, what your saying is I should expect being treated like this, after I have purchased the product, thus making it my property. I will go ahead and just go over to returns next time and go somewhere else.
      - icedchai 6y ago
        I'm just guessing. I don't work in retail but I'm sure all sorts of scams happen, ones we can't even imagine. Was this recent?
raincom 6y ago
Yes, they are like that. However, it is mandatory for the LP to check any thing that an employee has bought. They also check lunch bags, boxes. One time, LP caught an employee who stuffed his lunch bag with lots of DVDs. Other time, the LP manager and the customer service manager (who manages the front checkouts and cash) got colluded, and switched the direction of the camera near the cash counting area; then $10K cash was gone. Both managers got fired. Another incident. One LP associate and another guy at the return counter ran a scam together by issuing store credit for things that are NOT returned. For every return there, LP associate has to sign off.
jiveturkey 6y ago
too bad fry's is done for. despite the problems, i miss them now. towards the end, ie the last few years, when i brought an expensive-ish item to the counter, or more often when they brought it out of the cage for me to complete the purchase, i'd open the item at the counter in front of the cashier. 100% of the time the cashier would balk "hey you can't do that" (i hadn't paid yet), which is of course stupid to say. i just needed to verify that the item was new and also not a 52-switcheroo, as we used to call it. recently (2019-2020) i've bought 2 damaged high end products from best buy. outer box perfect, inner product damaged. luckily BB is like amazon and has complete no-hassle returns. more longer ago i've received a few duds from ebay and other non-amazon retail merchants. smaller value things i just write off but some of the bigger ones it's been painful getting the rep to take it back. the next time i do such a purchase i am setting up a camera to do an unboxing video.
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  Yep I just said above I’ve started opening any non cheap purchase in front of a Ring doorbell. Have a scissor in a hidden spot above front door on the outside so I don’t get too lazy and bring the unopened box inside. I’ve only done it twice so far after getting really bad luck and back to back swapped items in May. - On the other hand, my friend who sells on eBay frequently said even if I film myself packing up, sealing, and giving the same box to UPS or post office, EBay and PayPal (if they’re still doing eBay stuff) probably won’t care and side with buyer still.
Dylan16807 6y ago
Should have? Just because 'floor model/return' and 'only the box was touched' fall under the same umbrella doesn't mean you should treat them the same. A discount would be unreasonable, and getting your money back wouldn't improve your situation at all. Unless that was some kind of collector's item rice cooker.
RandomBacon 6y ago
No, you should have said "No thank you, have a great day" and keep on walking. You already bought the item and you have no duty to them for anything further. (I do this at any store that checks receipts, except for Costco, because I don't want to risk them revoking my membership. Never had a problem.)
- mindslight 6y ago
  I don't know why you're getting downvoted, but I also don't know why anyone would stand in a line to leave a store. Just say no thanks and walk past them, like every other unwanted solicitation.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

X-ray plus machine learning could probably solve that problem quite effectively. Or tamper-resistant RFID tags attached directly to the product.

dawnerd 6y ago

I think it's pretty obvious Amazon has done the math and determined it's not worth their time to do anything about it.

ApolloFortyNine 6y ago

>Hopefully, Amazon will learn it or make it a problem for the vendors. The problem is, it'd be trivial for someone with a sticker printer to slam a new label on the drive, saying 16TB. It'd be quite unrealistic to have Amazon own the tools and perform QA testing on all the millions of items on their site. You see a similar problem with knock off headphones, even plugging them in and listening to a song wouldn't be enough to find most fakes. I think the only real solution is this to be fixed at the government level. At the moment it's too expensive and risky to go after customers, even when Amazon can determine they are running this scam. Either you get drawn into a legal battle trying to prove it, or you get labeled as evil Amazon going after the innocent little guy in the media. It's easiest for Amazon to just raise prices 1% and call it a day. Which is what Walmart does for theft/return fraud as well, and likely every company in the U.S. There needs to be a law that makes it easy for Amazon (and other companies) to go "this account was found to have returned different merchandise 5 times, they need to pay $xxxx fine" and it to be done. But if even if one of these cases go to trial, it'd be at least a $5000 expense to Amazon. As long as this is impossible in our legal system, these scammers will continue to thrive.

sharkmerry 6y ago
> It'd be quite unrealistic to have Amazon own the tools and perform QA testing on all the millions of items on their site. You see a similar problem with knock off headphones, even plugging them in and listening to a song wouldn't be enough to find most fakes. If amazon doesnt have capacity to verify products they are selling, they shouldnt be selling them. They are knowingly contributing to fraud and we write it off as "they're too big to regulate themselves"
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  So should most customer returns just go to a landfill?
  - LegitShady 6y ago
    Returns are sold in pallets to resellers who accept the risk. But amazon shouldnt be selling returns if they can't or haven't verified the item is correct and functional.

kodt 6y ago

I recall people doing this but just putting a NIC in there and returning it to Best Buy. The Geek Squad employee would open the box to verify a card was in there, but wouldn’t know what it should look like and would accept a $15 NIC in place of a $200 video card.