Oh man. Unwanted memories. I used to work at Future Shop (basically Best Buy) [don't judge I was young:]. Every summer people would buy a camcorder, go on vacation, then return a sandy "unused" camera.

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

Unless it's different where you are you can still pull the Super Bowl rental at Costco. Returns on electronics are still accepted, just time limited to 90 days instead of "forever".

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.

Wait, they accepted to refund a broken, 7 years old product ?

How was this policy not abused to the point of killing the company ?

I believe Costco will cancel (and refund) a membership at their own discretion. I’ve read stories online that they have cancelled memberships for clearly exploiting return policies, as well as other things like grossly mistreating warehouse employees.

Yep, exactly this. Costco is willing to eat a few people abusing the system in return for those sweet sweet membership profits, but if you start to seriously abuse the system they have zero problem kicking you out.

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 The manager gave him his refund and then rescinded his membership and had the man walked out of the store.

The secret sauce: Costco sent that TV back to the company who sold it, and deducted the value from the next invoice.

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.

Well I think most people would not return in this sort of scenario.

Please, please do not correct that typo!

You'd probably like https://reddit.com/r/superbowl

Fixing that typo can be an expensive correction.

In the music world it's called "guitar center free rental."