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The report would be a lot more useful if there were some context for this data. How many items do comparable places like Wal Mart warehouses destroy each week?
by LeifCarrotson 5y ago
The report would be a lot more useful if there were some context for this data. How many items do comparable places like Wal Mart warehouses destroy each week? What's the reason for these items being marked for destruction? What percentage of the products are these; how many items go through the warehouse per week that are not destroyed?
I expect these are products returned with defects, that have been issued recalls, that were damaged during shipping, that expired, and all the other streams that aren't the 'happy path' of New product from manufacturer -> Amazon warehouse -> End user for lifetime of product. (Edit: or returned with no defects other than a lack of assured quality and possibly damaged packaging, but still not economically viable to ship back, verify, repackage, and relist as new and unused).
How much money, time, and energy would it take to ship them back to manufacturers where expert technicians could refurbish them to like-new condition if they're broken and fixable, to mark them down and sell them as blemished if they're cosmetically unacceptable but still functional, or to otherwise rescue them from destruction? As an industrial controls engineer in the manufacturing sector, I expect it's a lot more than just discarding it and fabricating a new one from raw materials on an automated production line.
I try to make my lines as flexible as possible, but there's an economy of scale problem that won't be put back into Pandora's box by shaming people with articles containing big numbers. Economics are immune to guilt, you have to find another way to penalize the behaviors you dislike or incentivize the behaviors you want. The reality is that it's really cheap and fast to build new things with low-touch mass production, making them easily diagnosed and repaired is less efficient, and the math says that it's cheaper to make 98% of your parts cheaply and write of 2% to waste than it is to spend 10% more per unit and have zero waste. I expect that the solution has to come either from technology that makes repair, self-diagnosis, packaging, and/or shipping cheaper, or from regulation that makes the 2% write off more expensive than 2%. Regardless of the solution, moralizing is ineffective.
- jschwartzi 5y agoNo Amazon definitely destroys most returns. I was informed that anything you can take to a Kohl’s is destroyed after return. That’s why sometimes it’s not available as an option.
- jasode 5y ago>No Amazon definitely destroys most returns. I was informed that anything you can take to a Kohl’s is destroyed after return. I don't think the existence of a Kohl's dropoff option means Amazon destroys 51%+ of their returns. Examples of people buying pallets of Amazon returns that are not destroyed: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=amazon+returns https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=amazon+returns Like many retailers, Amazon outsources many reverse logistics[1] operations. Some returned product is sold off. Some is destroyed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_logistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_logistics
- crazygringo 5y agoThat's not true -- you were informed wrong, sorry. Tons of items on Amazon list "Amazon Warehouse" as a cheaper buying option, which are literally the returned items they're reselling, with a listed condition determined from inspection. This includes items that were returned at Kohl's. Amazon destroys some returns, but that happens after the inspection process, if they determine the specific item was damaged enough that it's not profitable to resell.
- rob74 5y agoYup... it's just that inspecting the item also has a cost, which may lead to the item not being profitable to resell anymore, in which case it is destroyed without inspection. Or it's the individual employees who choose to play it safe and prefer to destroy an item rather than risk customer complaints if it get resold in less-than-mint condition.
- crazygringo 5y agoInspection is quite cheap. In cases where it's not worth returning+inspecting, Amazon generally tells you to just keep the item as well as the refund. That's generally the case with items under $10. If you abuse this, your account will ultimately be banned. If Amazon's bothering to accept the return in the first place, it's because it's worth inspecting. Also, individual employees don't get to "play it safe" in either direction. There are expected rates for grading returned items. An employee will be penalized or lose their job for wrongly marking resellable items as non-resellable (destroy), just as much as the opposite.
- joosters 5y agoThe report would be a lot more useful if there were some context for this data. How many items do comparable places like Wal Mart warehouses destroy each week? Not content with them going to the trouble of infiltrating Amazon to publish this report, you now insist on them doing the same to another company on a different continent, because without this context, the report isn’t very useful? Get over yourself!
- xeromal 5y agoChill out! Wow. I think he's just asking as a baseline. You see reports that "Costco spills 1000 gallons a day of water" but if you don't have any reference point, how do you know if that's low, average, or high. lol
- RicoElectrico 5y agoShh! You're destroying the narration! Who would otherwise find it shocking? /s Media outlets suck at providing context to numbers. It's ironic they always measure every goddamn thing with football fields and olympic swimming pools, but can't be bothered with percentages.
- tweetle_beetle 5y agoThe data was gathered by an undercover reporter who presumably had limited access to systems and reported on what they could. Amazon were free to provide the context, but chose not to. They are also virtually alone in the scale of their business, so context stops really having any meaning: even if they actually destroy ten times less (as a percentage of items sold) than other smaller retailers, a single Amazon warehouse in a single country destroying ~20,000 items a day is still noteworthy.
- throwaaskjdfh 5y ago> The report would be a lot more useful if there were some context for this data. I disagree with this, or at least the implication that there should have been more information gathered before publication. If the data is surprising against a common-sense set of expectations, it's Amazon's burden to provide a context for interpretation where the surprising information makes sense, not the report. Assuming the report's facts are in order, reporting accurate facts and leaving "contextualization" to someone else is good journalism, especially if the facts themselves are not widely known or actively hidden.
- skybrian 5y agoIt would be useful but it would probably require Amazon’s cooperation. I agree that it doesn’t mean the reporter did anything wrong to run the story with the info they could gather. Maybe someone from Amazon will explain in response to this story? But there is a mystery at the heart of this story. Amazon’s decisions seem hard to explain. We should let it remain a mystery until we learn more, without either assuming they’re evil villains or speculating that there must be a logical explanation. (And it might have been good for the story itself to say this.)
- throwaaskjdfh 5y ago> Amazon’s decisions seem hard to explain. We should let it remain a mystery This gets back to what I disagree with. If Amazon's decisions seem hard to explain, the decisions should be brought to the public's attention and Amazon should explain them. There is no reason for it to remain a mystery. And they'll never explain it unless there is a price to be paid for not explaining, e.g. being perceived as wasteful.
- skybrian 5y agoAcknowledging a mystery doesn’t mean you don’t try to solve it. But you are making an assumption of political power we don’t have, as a small number of people commenting on Hacker News. We can hope this story blows up enough that someone else, perhaps at Amazon, reveals some interesting information. But we’re not in control of whether that happens.
- Symbiote 5y ago> Economics are immune to guilt, you have to find another way to penalize the behaviors you dislike or incentivize the behaviors you want. Aren't articles like this part of that "other way"? The start of the long path to regulation.
- Arnt 5y agoHow would you regulate this? The entity that throws these things away is called something like "Amazon Warehouse 123", and its business is to accept goods that belong to others in bulk, keep them for a while, and finally either ship them singly to regular buyers, in bulk to the owner or someone else, or throw the away. The discarded goods are ones for which the owner either has told Amazon Warehouse 1234 to discard, or the owner has stopped paying or otherwise relieved the warehouse of its obligation to… warehouse those goods. Would you regulate the owner (which is often another Amazon subsidiary, but may also be someone else)? The warehouse? And what would you make them do?
- CarelessExpert 5y ago> Economics are immune to guilt ... Regardless of the solution, moralizing is ineffective. I'm just gonna quickly point out: This is simply not true and I'm surprised you'd make the claim. PR is a huge deal for most companies, and public shaming through press coverage is a very effective way to raise awareness of issues and push for change. Nike, for example, didn't address issues of sweatshop labour out of the goodness of their hearts, nor was it technology or government action that caused them to reform their practices. It was pure, simple public pressure that did the job.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoDid Nike address anything? I assumed everyone was still manufacturing in poorer countries due to more lax labor and environmental laws. They might run some ads how they changed suppliers or something, but people are not going to pay double or triple for clothing so a factory worker in Bangladesh can get a better quality of life at work. People will not even pay more so their neighbors and countryman can have a better quality of life.
- z77dj3kl 5y agoNo, but they will pay 2% more to fix something if it means 5% of customers don't write them off as "awful, unethical, big corp" and not buy stuff from them. There are plenty of examples of companies that did or did not react to negative PR, but the effect is in the statistics, not the individual anecdata.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoWhat are the statistics? All of these companies are still contracting out their labor to factories in countries with lower labor and environmental standards. Nike chooses not employ any laborers for a reason. I do not see them advertising that the people making the clothes badged with the Nike symbol are working maximum 8 hour days, or maximum 40 hours per week, or getting vacation days. It is all prose. The sweatshop conditions and disparities in quality of life at work between developed and developing countries have been known for 30+ years. The only thing causing improvements for the laborers in developing countries is increased demand for their labor, not some unverifiable PR response by Nike.
- xibalba 5y agoYes. There may be a portion of these items that is excess or obsolete and cannot be otherwise disposed of. There are accounting rules (which are both reasonable and justified) which force companies to write down this kind of inventory (i.e. it hits the P&L). Additionally, there are real costs associated with keeping these items in the warehouse which justify their disposal. I once worked on an E&O project at a large public company, and finding reasonable ways to dispose of this type of inventory was very difficult. Most ended up in the trash. In any event, the reporting on this subject is, once again, pretty inadequate and reads as borderline advocacy in the media's opposition to all things Amazon.
- baybal2 5y agoGarments are sold at astronomical markups in the West. So they are considered perishable almost like food if not sold in season. The new wave of brands embracing this make near no money on liquidation sales, so they don't even try.
- zeruch 5y ago"The report would be a lot more useful if there were some context for this data. How many items do comparable places like Wal Mart warehouses destroy each week? What's the reason for these items being marked for destruction? What percentage of the products are these; how many items go through the warehouse per week that are not destroyed?" If you read the article you might have caught some context: "Many vendors choose to house their products in Amazon’s vast warehouses. But the longer the goods remain unsold, the more a company is charged to store them. It is eventually cheaper to dispose of the goods, especially stock from overseas, than to continue storing the stock." and ""Overall, 50 percent of all items are unopened and still in their shrink wrap. The other half are returns and in good condition. Staff have just become numb to what they are being asked to do.”"
- baybal2 5y ago> The report would be a lot more useful if there were some context for this data. How many items do comparable places like Wal Mart warehouses destroy each week? Enormous amounts of all, and everything. I worked for most of my life in the cheaper side of electronics industry. Brands themselves often destroy huge amount of unsold stock. Apple famously quietly buys their iStuff from industrial refurbishers for destruction, to reduce the number of second hand iphones going around, and intentionally made engineering choices to make refurbishing very hard before. "Luxury" brands often mandate their retailer to always destroy unsold stock, and set goals like "no more discount for you if you let stock to hang on the shelves longer than 3 months"