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Do you honestly think retailers are throwing away 50% of their returned stock? They’re absolutely, 100% repacking and reselling what they can.

vel0city 2y ago
> Do you honestly think retailers are throwing away 50% of their returned stock? For lots of categories of goods like apparel, yes. Its far cheaper for them to trash the item than spend all that money on the reverse logistics of actually analyzing the item. Other categories are probably more like 20-30%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1yqcagavfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1yqcagavfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG8idKaX9KI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG8idKaX9KI If you're thinking the vast majority of your returns are getting restocked you're woefully uninformed.
- maccard 2y ago
  Both your links are related to amazon for cheap items, not e.g. high street retailers that are managing their own stock and inventory. Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No. [0] https://www.office.co.uk/ https://www.office.co.uk/
  - vel0city 2y ago
    These links are not just about Amazon, but Amazon is overrepresented here due to the high percentage of their overall online sales. And if Amazon can't get it to work with their already centralized logistics, smaller retailers probably have an even harder time with the reverse logistics. > Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No. Sure. If it costs them more to handle the return than what their margin on the goods would be, why would they reprocess it? Of that original sale say a $100, they probably only got $5-10 or so of original profit. And that was with the optimized supply chain getting it in to the original warehouse. So now they have to figure out the return shipping to the processing center, pay for inspections on the item, probably pay to re-ship to a warehouse, pay to re-stock it, and then for a lot of items list it as open box (if its anything that could have been plugged in to the wall it cannot be sold as new in the US), and then have all the regular costs of selling the item again. Or they just eat the loss and increase prices a few percent and send it to "energy recovery". Or they "donate" it and claim they gave $100 worth of goods to charity. Or they sell the lots of returned goods for a few bucks a pound at the place where the returns were originally mailed to.
mindslight 2y ago
I returned some hardcover books that were intended as gifts, but the corners got banged up in shipping (because why bother doing something right when you can make it up in scale?). Perfectly usable items, but I obviously wasn't going to pay the new condition price for items they damaged with incompetent handling. When I brought them to return, the clerk just stuck the Amazon return label right in the middle of the front dust jacket. I doubt that's getting resold.

vel0city 2y ago

> Do you honestly think retailers are throwing away 50% of their returned stock? For lots of categories of goods like apparel, yes. Its far cheaper for them to trash the item than spend all that money on the reverse logistics of actually analyzing the item. Other categories are probably more like 20-30%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1yqcagavfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1yqcagavfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG8idKaX9KI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG8idKaX9KI If you're thinking the vast majority of your returns are getting restocked you're woefully uninformed.

maccard 2y ago
Both your links are related to amazon for cheap items, not e.g. high street retailers that are managing their own stock and inventory. Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No. [0] https://www.office.co.uk/ https://www.office.co.uk/
- vel0city 2y ago
  These links are not just about Amazon, but Amazon is overrepresented here due to the high percentage of their overall online sales. And if Amazon can't get it to work with their already centralized logistics, smaller retailers probably have an even harder time with the reverse logistics. > Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No. Sure. If it costs them more to handle the return than what their margin on the goods would be, why would they reprocess it? Of that original sale say a $100, they probably only got $5-10 or so of original profit. And that was with the optimized supply chain getting it in to the original warehouse. So now they have to figure out the return shipping to the processing center, pay for inspections on the item, probably pay to re-ship to a warehouse, pay to re-stock it, and then for a lot of items list it as open box (if its anything that could have been plugged in to the wall it cannot be sold as new in the US), and then have all the regular costs of selling the item again. Or they just eat the loss and increase prices a few percent and send it to "energy recovery". Or they "donate" it and claim they gave $100 worth of goods to charity. Or they sell the lots of returned goods for a few bucks a pound at the place where the returns were originally mailed to.

mindslight 2y ago

I returned some hardcover books that were intended as gifts, but the corners got banged up in shipping (because why bother doing something right when you can make it up in scale?). Perfectly usable items, but I obviously wasn't going to pay the new condition price for items they damaged with incompetent handling. When I brought them to return, the clerk just stuck the Amazon return label right in the middle of the front dust jacket. I doubt that's getting resold.