> Free returns aren't free. We need to de-normalize this practice of people buying so much junk just to immediately return it.
One of the things you lose from online shopping is sizing. Shoes run in different sizes, lengths, widths. How do you suggest you order shoes to find the right size if shopping online?
If your solution to the problem is “don’t do the thing you want to do” it’s never going to work. It’s not just shoes, it’s all clothing, lots of tech (ever bought a device only to find out it doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do?), lots of homeware goods. You’re basically saying don’t shop online.
If you think retailers are dumping every pair of shoes they get returned, you’re wrong by the way.
> lots of tech (ever bought a device only to find out it doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do?)
No, because I don't buy the cheap no-name junk off Amazon. It's pretty rare for me to encounter returns for stuff like that, because I already try and avoid supporting the e-waste game from the get-go. But I would say if you honestly tried to get a good and it wasn't what was advertised that's a good reason for a return.
But acting like the majority of returns are things which weren't as advertised is ignoring reality. Look no further than sibling comments here where that user openly acknowledges buying more than needed regularly and returns the rest. They're not alone with this; tons of people behave in this way. Buy something, decide later they didn't really want it/need it, return it. Decent chance it went to the trash. It's not worth it for the retailer to actually inspect and restock it.
> If you think retailers are dumping every pair of shoes they get returned, you’re wrong by the way.
Not all of them, just most of them.
Buying a dozen shirts and returning 10 of them because in the end you just didn't like the fit, you probably sent 5-7 otherwise fine articles of clothing straight to the landfill. Maybe a few of those will make it to some "donation" scheme, which will probably send half of those "donation" bound goods to the landfill. Then the last few will get put on a boat in a giant pile of goods, dropped off to some poor part of the world, and have a 50/50 chance of being worn by someone there or just become another piece of trash floating around.
Buying five pairs of shoes and returning four of them probably sent 2-3 pairs to the landfill. The rest are probably following that same flow above.
> Do you honestly think retailers are throwing away 50% of their returned stock?
For lots of categories of goods like apparel, yes. Its far cheaper for them to trash the item than spend all that money on the reverse logistics of actually analyzing the item. Other categories are probably more like 20-30%.
Both your links are related to amazon for cheap items, not e.g. high street retailers that are managing their own stock and inventory. Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No.
These links are not just about Amazon, but Amazon is overrepresented here due to the high percentage of their overall online sales.
And if Amazon can't get it to work with their already centralized logistics, smaller retailers probably have an even harder time with the reverse logistics.
> Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No.
Sure. If it costs them more to handle the return than what their margin on the goods would be, why would they reprocess it? Of that original sale say a $100, they probably only got $5-10 or so of original profit. And that was with the optimized supply chain getting it in to the original warehouse. So now they have to figure out the return shipping to the processing center, pay for inspections on the item, probably pay to re-ship to a warehouse, pay to re-stock it, and then for a lot of items list it as open box (if its anything that could have been plugged in to the wall it cannot be sold as new in the US), and then have all the regular costs of selling the item again.
Or they just eat the loss and increase prices a few percent and send it to "energy recovery". Or they "donate" it and claim they gave $100 worth of goods to charity. Or they sell the lots of returned goods for a few bucks a pound at the place where the returns were originally mailed to.
I returned some hardcover books that were intended as gifts, but the corners got banged up in shipping (because why bother doing something right when you can make it up in scale?). Perfectly usable items, but I obviously wasn't going to pay the new condition price for items they damaged with incompetent handling. When I brought them to return, the clerk just stuck the Amazon return label right in the middle of the front dust jacket. I doubt that's getting resold.
That's not an option for a lot of people. For example, the vast majority of physical shoe stores simply don't carry my size. There is literally only a handful of stores in my country I could go to - and I don't even have an incredibly unusual size!
Physical stores increasingly cater to the average. They would rather stock 20 different items in 5 sizes than 10 different items in 10 sizes. All of the long-tail stuff is only available online, so you are forced to buy online.
One of the things you lose from online shopping is sizing. Shoes run in different sizes, lengths, widths. How do you suggest you order shoes to find the right size if shopping online?