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Why is this the case? Is there some societal expectation? I know that eg: american grocery stores are much more accepting of returns for any reason vs european

• slver 5y ago
  There is societal expectation. Frankly no one wants opened/used products, so you know those will be sold at significant discount, or refurbished, or thrown away. No business accepts that unless they HAVE to.
  • dheera 5y ago
    "Frankly no one wants opened/used products" Um ... When I buy for myself I look for open box products all the time. Steep discounts (sometimes 25% or more) are awesome for something that is essentially new. I don't give a shit about the unboxing experience unless it's a gift for someone else.
  • xvolter 5y ago
    No one wants used products for "new" prices, but plenty of people would be willing to buy open-box items at discounted prices. It's a huge thing for appliances. In most situations, however, things are simply repackaged and sold as new. Clothing, for example, is commonly returned; then hopefully re-washed before selling again as new. In most situations this applies to electronics as well, although electronics can be different. There are stories out there of people buying new SD cards that had photos on them. Most companies have a return center that processes returns, inspects them, resets them, and repackages them to be sold again as new. Exceptions are when returns are sent to stores… like Amazon or Best Buy handle returns differently than returns going back to the manufacturer.
    • drfuchs 5y ago
      In the USA, "simply repackaged and sold as new" is illegal for all products, even if the first purchaser hadn't even opened the box. You have to sell it as "refurbished" or some such.
• teachingassist 5y ago
  Does Apple offer more than the legal minimum in other countries? I'm curious, I don't know, but in my experience buying Apple products in several countries, they offer the legal minimum nicely, without resistance (which is already better than many corporations), but generally not more than that. If the legal after-sales minimum is nothing, then that's what I'd expect Apple to offer.
  • greenshackle2 5y ago
    Do most retailers? I haven't researched it or anything but my guess is that most retailers just offer the legal minimum, unless they explicitly have a generous return policy as a differentiating factor (Costco?).
    • coredog64 5y ago
      Costco walked back their return policy for many technology products.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • xvolter 5y ago
    I don't think most stores would offer returns, except it is often forced on them buy credit card companies to protect their consumers. American Express, Visa, and Mastercard all have some kind of requirement that the merchant allows returns (usually 14 days minimum). Otherwise the consumer can file a chargeback and the resolution will go to the consumer in most situations.
• Waterluvian 5y ago
  I think good return policies is good for business IF the business is operating in a society that generally behaves ethically on that matter. If the majority of returns are good faith, just swallow them and keep everything moving smoothly with happy customers. If you have a critical mass of customers who disregard right vs. wrong and just see a mark to be exploited, you're pretty much forced to behave adversarially, and everyone loses.
  • coredog64 5y ago
    Part of that is whether you live in a high trust or low trust society.
    • Waterluvian 5y ago
      I'm fascinated by the granularity of "society" in this case. The amount of trust in Toronto vs. Waterloo vs. where I am now (rural) is quite stark in a number of cases.
  • vishnugupta 5y ago
    This is right on the money. I worked at a startup catering to Indian consumers. It was a typical transactional product coupled with offers. The time and energy we spent on fighting different kinds of abuse was outright insane. The fraudsters would come up with a new trick each week to abuse offers. No matter what check we placed (based on e-mail, phone number, IP etc., etc.,) they would beat it. Based on my experience I can think of a few contributing factors. 1. Indian population. Lot of businesses underestimate this. They are used to reason in terms of %. But when you have a population of 1300 the % could still be within a threshold but absolute number would be larger than entire nations. 2. Outright incompetent cyber policing. The Indian consumers getting access to cheaper smartphone and internet exploded in the 2nd half of last decade. Naturally the country's police have just been unable to scale up to deal with new age crimes. 3. Poverty. It's super lucrative for young poor people to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities and abuse goodwill policies. The return policy is a good example. E-commerce companies in India are riddled with fraudulent return of goods. The modus operandi is simple enough. Order a smart phone, return a faulty/old one of the same model, sell the new one. Profit. 4. Extreme levels of corruption and vast geography. There are some well known cybercrime hotspot PIN codes but chasing the fraudsters is mostly futile. The police are mostly lethargic and more often than not are happy to work with the criminals to collect a weekly payment. It's more lucrative that way, why kill the golden goose? 5. Cheap internet, cheaper SIM connection. The country is awash with cheap bandwidth and SIM connection. To an extent you'll find new SIM packets lying on the sidewalk. This makes it extremely hard to tackle online frauds.
• Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  I think you'll find that European consumer rights laws leave the US in the dust. It's much easier to refund/return stuff over here because almost everything has a better warranty than the USA.
  • Google234 5y ago
    Yep and you pay <20% more for that privilege. There’s no free lunch