‘Serial returners’: How COVID and free shipping made overbuying the new norm
Easy returns have encouraged what retail analysts call bracketing — buying multiples of an item in different sizes or styles and returning what doesn’t work.
Employee Rebecca Yazzie said, “It comes in waves. It’ll be quiet for a little bit and then we’ll get a ton of people all at once.” It’s also pressuring retailers, especially smaller brick-and-mortar shops that went online to survive COVID but often can’t afford the generous return policies popularized by mega-players like Amazon and Walmart.
But it’s also because some retailers have made online returns so painless that consumers see overbuying as a perfectly acceptable way of sampling products. Incentives like these have led to certain excesses. After last summer’s heat wave, Seattle-area shoppers returned “close to 30″ air conditioners to the Interbay store alone, Low says. Shoppers have also tried to send back fully assembled e-bikes, sales of which soared in the pandemic. “The driver will show up and there’s just, like, ‘Here’s a bike, you need to take this bike,’” McDonald said.
Drop-off locations earn a small handling fee from shippers — Sip and Ship, for example, gets 50 cents for each UPS and FedEx return but nothing for USPS. Yet while that rarely covers the extra labor or insurance, many are loathe to charge extra for a service many consumers now seem to regard as a constitutional right.
“The supply chain, in general, wasn’t built to go backwards,” says John Morris, who runs CBRE’s logistics service line.