We've optimized standardized manufacturing to incredible levels, while any kind of "exception handling" is much harder to optimize, and thus becomes more expensive relative to manufacturing.
A return isn't equivalent to the original item. A return is an item of unknown quality/status that requires manual handling to be turned into a known, sellable item, unless you want to sell boxes full of rocks as new items. The cheaper making a new item is, the less worth it is to deal with the exceptions.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. If re-making is less resource intensive (human labor is also a resource) than the alternative, then re-making is often the right choice.
Repairing is also waste: It often involves inefficient one-off shipping and handling of spare parts, and is a massive sink for human effort.
Every time people rant (rightfully!) about corporations are bad, I think of any experience I had in retail and realize sure but people are assholes too :-D
What it was to prevent was lifetime free warranty and upgrades. Buy a laptop, use it for 3 years, come back and say "I don't like it anymore.", get your money back, buy new laptop with upgraded specs... repeat.
And before you think this is theoretical, when I worked there we had a guy return a TV. It was a ~7 year old rear-projection TV that was bought before the 90 day policy was implemented. It had died well out of warranty.
So he returned it, got his ~$4k back, walked out on the floor and grabbed a $2k LCD and went home with a brand new LCD TV and $2k in his pocket in exchange for his 7 year old broken TV.
How was this policy not abused to the point of killing the company ?
I saw this happen first-hand while I was waiting in line to renew my membership. There was a man in front of me in line who from what I overheard of his conversation with the manager was returning something like his 5th tv in a year. The manager gave him his refund and then rescinded his membership and had the man walked out of the store.
If Samsung, etc didn't like it, Costco would drop them as a vendor real fast. So the merchants would eat it. Apparently it got bad enough that they stopped eating it.
Europe farmer’s protest: https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=manure+protest
> sweatshop level of insanity
Turkers: https://www.vocativ.com/410794/are-virtual-sweatshops-the-fu...
> capitalist duty
toil? profit? consume? capitalist heteropatriarchal citizen’s duty to literally produce people? work while experiencing pleasure?
> consume people
Accept Cannibal diversity today
> planet be damned
Worship beastly numbers
Instead we should be forcing stores to not only always accept unwanted items, if anything to encourage them to exercise more care preventing low-quality/counterfeit/misrepresented products. But to also be at least partially responsible for the total waste/recycling burden their sales create.
> Whenever someone hands me a flyer, it's kind of like they're saying "here, you throw this away." - Mitch Hedberg