Welcome to retail.

On online retail, that’s why delivery services weight the packages, take photos of the boxes delivered etc.

On retail in general, we’ve enjoyed these same questions for decades. You buy a video card, open the box and a connector is bent. When getting it back to the brick and mortar store, you’ll have quite a time explaining you didn’t crush it by accident. Shops that value you will help. Other will just show you the door, and you’ll need to find many other people with similar issues to finally get your voice heard.

A lot of people here seem to be arguing Amazon returns are black and white… they are not, and you’ll have the same discussions as everywhere else, except you’ll be sending messages and photos back and forth.

There is an important distinction - if you buy something in store, at least hypothetically have a chance to inspect. You at least will see that the box is sealed and undamaged, and you could open it if you insist.

When you get a package delivered, you can do none of those things

In my experience this is a distinction without being relevant in a lot of cases. I used to shop at a national retailer that had a very generous return policy, the other side of it being that they’d inspect returns and potentially repackage them when judging they had been unused (sealed package etc.), except for super high margin stuff where they’d be more open to just discard the returns.

But then fraudster learned the ropes, and after a while knowing wether your product was actually new or not got basically impossible. They still had a generous return policy, so you wouldn’t be left SOL, but expectations got a lot different.

I’ll aim for a brick and mortar retailer if I go for a specific well established brand I’m willing to pay extra for (in particular if it’s the brand’s direct store), but otherwise I don’t feel physical retail has much of a high ground compared to online ones given the overhead and other limitations.