22 ms·

While this may seem shocking, logistically it makes sense. It’s potentially easier to destroy or dump a returned product than re-preparing it for sale. I went

While this may seem shocking, logistically it makes sense. It’s potentially easier to destroy or dump a returned product than re-preparing it for sale. I went out on a date with a program manager for one of Amazon’s return programs and she told me her job was basically finding out ways to repurpose returns as cheaply as possible. Apparently destroying and dumping it’s the easiest and least resource consuming way to deal with returns. In a similar note, search for Amazon Warehouse. That’s one of their programs for returned merchandise and sometimes I have found insane deals there. But you gotta check often.

kennywinker 6y ago
> Apparently destroying and dumping it’s the easiest and less resource consuming way to deal with returns. Not the least resource consuming - the least costly to amazon. There is a massive environmental cost to the practice - it's just externalized. If the companies involved (amazon, the manufacturer) had to bare the full environmental cost, the calculation would often come out different.
- whoisjuan 6y ago
  Totally! That’s what I was going for. Least resource consuming but I’m talking about economic resources. Like man hours, packaging, transportation, etc. The environmental impact is big! I hope this is being considered in their Climate Pledge.
  - lotu 6y ago
    If the environmental cost is dominated by shipping I could see destruction as more environmentally friendly. This is likely the for many small cheap items.
    - kennywinker 6y ago
      Fine, but two things are happenings: 1. It’s being hidden from consumers, who might adapt their behavior if they knew a return meant the trash. 2. Stuff is shipped back to amazon and then disposed of.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        I’d they didn’t require step 2, their “return” rates would skyrocket though.
        kennywinker 6y ago
        Their return policy is designed to make you buy things without thinking too hard about it or worrying about the quality - the "ah who cares, if it sucks I can just return it" mentality. That strategy means that you buy things you don't need, causing a TON of environmental externalities. So, yeah, they'd have more fraud - maybe their return policy isn't compatible with the environment. Maybe their profit margins are not compatible with the environment. Maybe... just maybe... their entire business model isn't compatible.
      - ummonk 6y ago
        I imagine most consumers who return items would be throwing them away instead.
        kennywinker 6y ago
        My thought was, if I knew it was being thrown out, I would be more careful about what I buy. I suspect a lot of people would feel the same way. It's like a mini trolley-problem, but for the guilt of throwing something perfectly good in the trash.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  > Not the least resource consuming - the least costly to amazon. I suspect that cost is a much better approximation of resource consumption than what feels wasteful, especially because it forces you to factor human time as a resource, which many environmental activists like to treat as infinite and free.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    I would absolutely agree with you, IF externalities were priced into the cost. Things like environmental damage are not part of the cost of something, so amazon does not factor it into their decision. If we had things like carbon taxes on goods, then amazon's decision would likely be much more optimal for the environment.
  - Swenrekcah 6y ago
    Imagine the cost, in both time and work, to create all of the iron ore, coal and all the other natural resources that go into a single piece of crap sold on amazon. If that were priced into the crap, I'm sure having some humans spend a few of their hours on repurpuosing it would make financial sense.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      It is priced in by the price of the item.
      - Swenrekcah 6y ago
        No, what's priced in is the cost of digging something up. Not the cost of creating it in the first place. Also not priced in is the environmental cost of discarding the assembled product. Edit: I might add that in the cost of digging up resources, in many cases the lives of the people doing the digging are not valued much more than the hours of the people doing the sorting of returned items. So that's something to think about as well.
        kennywinker 6y ago
- savanaly 6y ago
  What about the dumping is not internalized? Do companies not pay for landfill? I know that historically companies would take their trucks up the river and dump it in and hope nobody noticed but I sort of doubt that Amazon does that today.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    The cost of the landfill is a pittance compared to the ultimate full remediation cost, and damage to the environment. Likewise the cost of pollution from all the shipping and manufacturing of the old and new items and returns is (almost) completely not bourne by Amazon.
- ummonk 6y ago
  There is a significant environmental cost to the logistics of refurbishing, storing, repackaging, and reshipping returned goods though.
  - kennywinker 6y ago
    Yup. That's why the most environmental move you can do is just to buy and consume less stuff.
post_break 6y ago
I got a $350 Japanese made pump for my koi pond for $100 from warehouse. It was brand new but it leaked the oil from inside into the box so that’s why it was returned. I don’t even think it was turned on. Replaced the oil and works perfectly.
toast0 6y ago
> Apparently destroying and dumping it’s the easiest and least resource consuming way to deal with returns. They used to routinely ask the customer to destroy and dump the items, which was certainly less marginally costly. (If it encouraged more abuse, that cost is borne by other business units)
ryanSrich 6y ago
I wonder why someone couldn’t build a business like this. Basically contract with Amazon to handle all of their returns. That company then salvages and resells anything they can.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  That's what happens. That's the "liquidators" the article/video is referring to, and most of the stuff goes there. Can't do that with e.g. counterfeits though, or with products that may be dangerous. And not everything is resellable in practice. To resell something you need to 1. determine what you have (not just the product but also the state it is in), 2. have someone who wants it, 3. that person needs to be willing to accept the risk of getting a used/substandard product (higher risk of it arriving broken), 4. you have to find that person, 5. you have to get the product to that person, 6. you have to manage the whole overhead of the process (additional shipping, sorting, testing, ...). Each of these steps is associated with costs, both financial and environmental (the latter will skyrocket as soon as you start e.g. attributing some of the environmental footprint of the people whose labor you spend on these tasks to those tasks). It's very unlikely that Amazon wouldn't optimize something so obvious. Once the returns are generated, there's probably not much of a better way to deal with it. However, if you ban returns, online shopping becomes less attractive - people will use retail stores again. Which also toss stuff that doesn't sell, use a lot more real estate, air conditioning, and again, human labor. There's a reason online is often cheaper, and it may well be "cheaper" (better) for the environment too, despite the waste.
- humaniania 6y ago
  They do. Look up amazon pallet videos.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
These days there are also so many health and safety concerns that putting any items which had their packaging unsealed back on sale is a big risk unless they are carefully checked and tested. Often this is not cost effective or even doable at all.
CivBase 6y ago
> It’s potentially easier to destroy or dump a returned product than re-preparing it for sale. Why can't returned goods be resold as "open box" or "scratch and dent" products with missing or damaged packaging for a significant discount? Surely making some money is better than paying to dispose of it - not to mention the terrible optics when you get caught.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "Why can't returned goods be resold as "open box" or "scratch and dent" products with missing or damaged packaging for a significant discount?" Most likely because a person has to carefully inspect and repackage it (expensive and the volume is large) and it's a separate inventory category that has to be managed and have separate storage space allocated for it (another expense) and, on top of all that, it doesn't bring in as much money as a new item. And if there was some problem or damage that wasn't caught by the inspection, it's yet another return. The difficulty of managing customer returned items is common to all retailers and has been known for a while, e.g.: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/10/growing-online-sales-means-more-returns-and-trash-for-landfills.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/10/growing-online-sales-means-m... https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/26/news/retail-returns-landfill/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/26/news/retail-returns-landfil...
jackfoxy 6y ago
Logistics pipelines are designed to efficiently flow in one direction only. At large scale if returns are handled at all, it has to be a separate system. In the extreme case of logistic pipelines into war zones it leads to what looks like extreme waste. There was an infamous case during the Vietnam war when enterprising journalists exposed how expensive stuff, the really big item being F4 Phantom jet engines, that could not be used were being destroyed on site. Some politicians got to profess outrage at the Pentagon's wastefulness and get air time on the evening news. I believe there were even congressional hearings into the case of the jet engines. There really is no other way in a wartime logistics pipeline. The cargo airplanes land one after another. All the labor and equipment is dedicated to unloading the airplane as fast as possible and loading on waiting trucks. The loaded trucks drive out the exit gate. Aircraft take off as soon as they are emptied to repeat a cargo run. Empty trucks come in the entry gate and queue up to go on the tarmac for loading. There is no room in the process for a loaded truck to enter the premise, or for an empty plane to wait around. There is no labor or equipment available to do loading in the reverse direction either. And that's just the simplified version. There are many more nodes in the system expecting unidirectional flow. The goal is to get as much stuff into the war zone as fast as possible. Anything deviating from this goal is wasteful. The big bottleneck in Amazon's process is probably, among others, how inefficient it would be to restock individual items in the warehouse.
- oska 6y ago
  This reads like a rationalisation to me. I would guess that the forces that beat the US in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese & the Viet Cong, were far more parsimonious in their resource use and put effort into extracting their equipment. Of course, in the Vietnam War, the corporations back in the US who were making huge profits in supplying the war weren't at all worried about equipment being wasted overseas and not returned. And so we're back at the US military industrial complex and all of its unethical madness, famously satirised by Heller in Catch-22.

kennywinker 6y ago

> Apparently destroying and dumping it’s the easiest and less resource consuming way to deal with returns. Not the least resource consuming - the least costly to amazon. There is a massive environmental cost to the practice - it's just externalized. If the companies involved (amazon, the manufacturer) had to bare the full environmental cost, the calculation would often come out different.

whoisjuan 6y ago
Totally! That’s what I was going for. Least resource consuming but I’m talking about economic resources. Like man hours, packaging, transportation, etc. The environmental impact is big! I hope this is being considered in their Climate Pledge.
- lotu 6y ago
  If the environmental cost is dominated by shipping I could see destruction as more environmentally friendly. This is likely the for many small cheap items.
  - kennywinker 6y ago
    Fine, but two things are happenings: 1. It’s being hidden from consumers, who might adapt their behavior if they knew a return meant the trash. 2. Stuff is shipped back to amazon and then disposed of.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      I’d they didn’t require step 2, their “return” rates would skyrocket though.
      - kennywinker 6y ago
        Their return policy is designed to make you buy things without thinking too hard about it or worrying about the quality - the "ah who cares, if it sucks I can just return it" mentality. That strategy means that you buy things you don't need, causing a TON of environmental externalities. So, yeah, they'd have more fraud - maybe their return policy isn't compatible with the environment. Maybe their profit margins are not compatible with the environment. Maybe... just maybe... their entire business model isn't compatible.
    - ummonk 6y ago
      I imagine most consumers who return items would be throwing them away instead.
      - kennywinker 6y ago
        My thought was, if I knew it was being thrown out, I would be more careful about what I buy. I suspect a lot of people would feel the same way. It's like a mini trolley-problem, but for the guilt of throwing something perfectly good in the trash.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
> Not the least resource consuming - the least costly to amazon. I suspect that cost is a much better approximation of resource consumption than what feels wasteful, especially because it forces you to factor human time as a resource, which many environmental activists like to treat as infinite and free.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  I would absolutely agree with you, IF externalities were priced into the cost. Things like environmental damage are not part of the cost of something, so amazon does not factor it into their decision. If we had things like carbon taxes on goods, then amazon's decision would likely be much more optimal for the environment.
- Swenrekcah 6y ago
  Imagine the cost, in both time and work, to create all of the iron ore, coal and all the other natural resources that go into a single piece of crap sold on amazon. If that were priced into the crap, I'm sure having some humans spend a few of their hours on repurpuosing it would make financial sense.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    It is priced in by the price of the item.
    - Swenrekcah 6y ago
      No, what's priced in is the cost of digging something up. Not the cost of creating it in the first place. Also not priced in is the environmental cost of discarding the assembled product. Edit: I might add that in the cost of digging up resources, in many cases the lives of the people doing the digging are not valued much more than the hours of the people doing the sorting of returned items. So that's something to think about as well.
      - kennywinker 6y ago
savanaly 6y ago
What about the dumping is not internalized? Do companies not pay for landfill? I know that historically companies would take their trucks up the river and dump it in and hope nobody noticed but I sort of doubt that Amazon does that today.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  The cost of the landfill is a pittance compared to the ultimate full remediation cost, and damage to the environment. Likewise the cost of pollution from all the shipping and manufacturing of the old and new items and returns is (almost) completely not bourne by Amazon.
ummonk 6y ago
There is a significant environmental cost to the logistics of refurbishing, storing, repackaging, and reshipping returned goods though.
- kennywinker 6y ago
  Yup. That's why the most environmental move you can do is just to buy and consume less stuff.

post_break 6y ago

I got a $350 Japanese made pump for my koi pond for $100 from warehouse. It was brand new but it leaked the oil from inside into the box so that’s why it was returned. I don’t even think it was turned on. Replaced the oil and works perfectly.

toast0 6y ago

> Apparently destroying and dumping it’s the easiest and least resource consuming way to deal with returns. They used to routinely ask the customer to destroy and dump the items, which was certainly less marginally costly. (If it encouraged more abuse, that cost is borne by other business units)

ryanSrich 6y ago

I wonder why someone couldn’t build a business like this. Basically contract with Amazon to handle all of their returns. That company then salvages and resells anything they can.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
That's what happens. That's the "liquidators" the article/video is referring to, and most of the stuff goes there. Can't do that with e.g. counterfeits though, or with products that may be dangerous. And not everything is resellable in practice. To resell something you need to 1. determine what you have (not just the product but also the state it is in), 2. have someone who wants it, 3. that person needs to be willing to accept the risk of getting a used/substandard product (higher risk of it arriving broken), 4. you have to find that person, 5. you have to get the product to that person, 6. you have to manage the whole overhead of the process (additional shipping, sorting, testing, ...). Each of these steps is associated with costs, both financial and environmental (the latter will skyrocket as soon as you start e.g. attributing some of the environmental footprint of the people whose labor you spend on these tasks to those tasks). It's very unlikely that Amazon wouldn't optimize something so obvious. Once the returns are generated, there's probably not much of a better way to deal with it. However, if you ban returns, online shopping becomes less attractive - people will use retail stores again. Which also toss stuff that doesn't sell, use a lot more real estate, air conditioning, and again, human labor. There's a reason online is often cheaper, and it may well be "cheaper" (better) for the environment too, despite the waste.
humaniania 6y ago
They do. Look up amazon pallet videos.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

These days there are also so many health and safety concerns that putting any items which had their packaging unsealed back on sale is a big risk unless they are carefully checked and tested. Often this is not cost effective or even doable at all.

CivBase 6y ago

> It’s potentially easier to destroy or dump a returned product than re-preparing it for sale. Why can't returned goods be resold as "open box" or "scratch and dent" products with missing or damaged packaging for a significant discount? Surely making some money is better than paying to dispose of it - not to mention the terrible optics when you get caught.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "Why can't returned goods be resold as "open box" or "scratch and dent" products with missing or damaged packaging for a significant discount?" Most likely because a person has to carefully inspect and repackage it (expensive and the volume is large) and it's a separate inventory category that has to be managed and have separate storage space allocated for it (another expense) and, on top of all that, it doesn't bring in as much money as a new item. And if there was some problem or damage that wasn't caught by the inspection, it's yet another return. The difficulty of managing customer returned items is common to all retailers and has been known for a while, e.g.: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/10/growing-online-sales-means-more-returns-and-trash-for-landfills.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/10/growing-online-sales-means-m... https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/26/news/retail-returns-landfill/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/26/news/retail-returns-landfil...

jackfoxy 6y ago

Logistics pipelines are designed to efficiently flow in one direction only. At large scale if returns are handled at all, it has to be a separate system. In the extreme case of logistic pipelines into war zones it leads to what looks like extreme waste. There was an infamous case during the Vietnam war when enterprising journalists exposed how expensive stuff, the really big item being F4 Phantom jet engines, that could not be used were being destroyed on site. Some politicians got to profess outrage at the Pentagon's wastefulness and get air time on the evening news. I believe there were even congressional hearings into the case of the jet engines. There really is no other way in a wartime logistics pipeline. The cargo airplanes land one after another. All the labor and equipment is dedicated to unloading the airplane as fast as possible and loading on waiting trucks. The loaded trucks drive out the exit gate. Aircraft take off as soon as they are emptied to repeat a cargo run. Empty trucks come in the entry gate and queue up to go on the tarmac for loading. There is no room in the process for a loaded truck to enter the premise, or for an empty plane to wait around. There is no labor or equipment available to do loading in the reverse direction either. And that's just the simplified version. There are many more nodes in the system expecting unidirectional flow. The goal is to get as much stuff into the war zone as fast as possible. Anything deviating from this goal is wasteful. The big bottleneck in Amazon's process is probably, among others, how inefficient it would be to restock individual items in the warehouse.

oska 6y ago
This reads like a rationalisation to me. I would guess that the forces that beat the US in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese & the Viet Cong, were far more parsimonious in their resource use and put effort into extracting their equipment. Of course, in the Vietnam War, the corporations back in the US who were making huge profits in supplying the war weren't at all worried about equipment being wasted overseas and not returned. And so we're back at the US military industrial complex and all of its unethical madness, famously satirised by Heller in Catch-22.