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> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some c
by jwr 8mo ago
> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels
Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process.
(all assuming the product is not sold as "new")
- buckle8017 8mo agoThe problem is the eBay sellers always label defective stuff as simply new product. People buying it may or may not be ok with the defect. Think bad welds, usually they're fine for a while and then they're very much not.
- ljf 8mo agoHad this recently, bought a dehumidifier for a good price, marked as new - arrived and had obviously been opened and didn't work. Out of a desire to have a dehumidifier sooner than later I was about to open it up when I saw it already had been, so I opened a return instead and sent it back. I can only assume it is worth it for the seller to sell untested goods as new, a good number must work long enough for the buyer to be happy.
- bombcar 8mo agoI still remember Fry's Electronics and trying to find anything that hadn't been opened-returned-reshinkwrapped. Often it was impossible. Not sure why they had so many but eh whatever, it mostly worked fine.
- acdha 8mo agoIt’s not hard to mark things as defective, liquidated, etc. so those eBay sellers can face fraud charges. We shouldn’t be sending stuff to landfills just to save a few pennies in permanent marker.
- buckle8017 8mo agofraud charges for ebay sellers over stating the condition of their items? hilarious fantasy
- acdha 8mo agoThere are people in jail for this right now who presumably don’t find it funny, and in this scenario the volume would be high enough that prosecutors would definitely be interested.
- buckle8017 8mo agoShow me one person in prison for this
- acdha 8mo agoHere’s the first hit on Google: https://www.justice.gov/usao-nm/pr/us-attorneys-office-secures-conviction-california-man-wire-fraud-and-federal-indian-arts https://www.justice.gov/usao-nm/pr/us-attorneys-office-secur...
- buckle8017 8mo agoCounterfeits isn't selling used/defective as new.
- mschuster91 8mo ago> all assuming the product is not sold as "new" And that is a very big assumption to make. Recycling is ripe with fraud simply because how much money is in the system. The only way you can really be sure that "recycling" companies don't end up screwing you over is to do rough material separation on your own and dispose of the different material streams (paper packaging, manuals, plastics, PCBs) by different companies.
- idopmstuff 8mo agoNo, because even if they're not sold as new (which as others have commented is often not the case), they're still competing with you for sales. Someone who would have paid full price for a new one instead gets a version with a slight issue at 25% off. That's fine if you're the one selling it at a discount, but here you've lost money on the production and are now losing even more money because you've lost a sale of a full price unit.
- iamkonstantin 8mo agoI think the spirit of that regulation is so you as the producer see this as an incentive to better manage production so there is no need to discard/burn 10% of everything.
- michaelt 8mo ago> Isn't that good though? It's good for shoppers (if they're informed), the recycler, and the environment. It's bad for the original maker. Imagine a factory mix-up means some ExampleCo jeans are made of much lower quality materials than normal. They'll wear out much faster. But ExampleCo's quality control does its job, notices the inferior quality before they hit store shelves, and sends them for recycling. If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then: 1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales. 2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation 3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.
- blackoil 8mo agoHow feasible is to remove tag, scratch serial number?
- oblio 8mo agoEspecially since EU laws are announced 5-10 years in advance, manufacturers have time to actually design this. For example they could make easily removable labels.
- kshacker 8mo agoWhat stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels? Or why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill? I suspect this will need to be a cultural change. If ExampleCo does it but not RandomCo, of course your reputation will suffer. But if the law is for all of EU, it gives everyone an equal footing.
- krisoft 8mo ago> What stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels? They can. Doesn’t help with the reputational damage though. People who think they bought an ExampleCo jean will still think that the company quality has slipped. They will still tell all their friends that the “new jeans made by ExampleCo are not like they used to”. Not all of them all the time, but some of them some of the time. > why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill? That doesnt help with their reputation.
- b00ty4breakfast 8mo agoIf I donate something on the premise that it's going to be used for some charitable cause and then it just ends up on some skuzzy listing on ebay, that would, at best, be deceitful. It's "good" insofar as the item is not being dumped in some landfill but it's not "good" insofar as it was obtained through deception.