The Costco I worked at had a lady that came in every holiday season and bought over $10k of holiday decorations. Like clockwork she'd be back in January to return it all, nearly all of it having been opened and used. She'd been doing this for almost a decade by the time I started working there.

It's gonna be impossible to concretely discern intent from the data you could get, but it's pretty obvious there's _some_ abuse. The only question is where you draw the line on abuse and how much.

January at our store was a rush of returns of opened and used Christmas decorations because "I decided I don't want it anymore." Often times from people that had done the same thing year after year. We'll never know what those people really intended when they bought it in the fall, but you'd have to be pretty damn charitable to assume the best of intent in all the cases. Especially when it was people doing it multiple years in a row.

A number of outdoor gear stores like REI and (sorta) LL Bean have discontinued lifetime returns during the past few years. I've known people who used policies as sort of a lifetime subscription to, say, a rain jacket. I'm not sure the reason the policies eventually changed.

I assume it's some combination of degraded quality as most stuff is made in the same Asian factories and an increasingly widespread attitude that it's OK to take anything that isn't nailed down.

He does not work the returns desk, he is primarily a forklift driver. I find it interesting to hear about the seasonal variations though.

A couple random things - the first stack of shelves that face the front of the store are managed to give a good impression. They always keep those shelves full of pallets and try to have a lot of only a few items to give a clean look. If the warehouse has empty space they try to keep it so you can't see from the center of the store.