A family member of mine a few weeks ago was sorting through her Amazon boxes and found new brand new Samsung tablets in one. She had not ordered them. She inspected the box and her name and address was on a mailing label. On the opposite side of the box was a mailing label for someone half way across the country.
She boxed up the tablets and took them to the post office and told them that they must belong to the other name on the box as she had not ordered them. After waiting a while and getting word from supervisors of supervisors, the post office wanted to wash their hands of it and sent her on the way with instructions to contact Amazon to sort it out. Sounds fair.
However, she contacts Amazon who sent the request through the channels and she received an email telling her just to keep the tablets with apologies for her inconvenience. She could not believe that Amazon would want over $1k of retail value just to disappear, so she called. The service rep confirmed that the email was correct and just to keep the tablets. She asked for a personal confirmation email so that there was no misunderstanding and received one, again apologizing for the inconvenience and telling her that the tablets were her property.
I was dumbfounded by this. First, is there any scam out there like this? I can’t think of one. Second, if this is legit, why would Amazon not send a shipping box out to get them back? I could see if it was a $20 or $30 item, but this is over $1k of retail value. Why would a company respond this way?
This is routine for Amazon. There are thousands of stories out there like this. It’s basically not worth their time to restock and resell items, as it would require a large paid workforce just to handle the load. It also make customers happy to get something for nothing which means they are guaranteed return business = profit.
this has been true for a while , companies routinely don’t want the item(s) back if they are not very expensive. If it’s a television that is worth $2k or more they might want that back.
Most of the online mattress companies give you up to 3 months to test out the mattress and you can return it if you don’t like it. But instead of a return usually they tell you to keep it or donate it to charity.
Now that I think about it, this still doesn’t seem right. You said “thousands” but suppose 1 thousand. One thousand items for which the company could receive one thousand dollars. That is one million dollars.
Assume return shipping at $50 just to be safe. That’s $50k. Let’s assume it takes two hours to restock a returned item, which seems excessive. At $15/hr, that is $30 per item or $30k total. I would spend $80k to make $1 million. What am I missing?
Do you know that these are high end tablets costing $500? There are heavily discounted Samsung tablets on Amazon costing $100. If it’s one of these, where it’s an old low-end model and they are trying to clear excess inventory, something that might never sell, I can believe that their models might put the expected value at less than $50.
I’d be willing to bet that since they’re tablets, Amazon (or the vendor who actually shipped them) couldn’t just take them back and re-sell them, they’d have to verify that nothing had been placed on them first.
Might want to make sure there’s nothing suspicious on them yoursef.
My bet is that if the Samsung box has been opened in any way, the items can’t be resold as new. So off they go to the places that buy Amazon scratch & dents.
I’d bet Amazon has a pretty low rate of errors for their fulfillment centers. So to end up creating a department with a supe and several employees, you’ talking about at least a couple hundred grand in salary and benefits. Plus the cost of employee training, computers for them to use, etc. Then you have the cost to for the call tag for the return, plus keeping up with that product that’s out there. Then, when it’s returned, someone has to examine it, determine it’s disposition (return to stock, scrap, salvage, other), and make sure it gets there. When it’s returned to stock, it isn’t just set on a shelf, the inventory has to be adjusted. The entire returns area is totally hands-on, labor-intensive, while Amazon is all about managing efficiencies. Just having to handle the communication involved on your email was costly for them.
Easier just to say “Keep it” and figure the problem resolved.
It’s not going to be a thousand $500 tablets (even if we assume they are in fact worth $500 each and resellable for that amount). It might be a few $500 tablets, a few $400 TVs, a $600 camera, and a whole bunch of random kitchen junk and housewares and books and CDs and DVDs and clothing and so forth retailing closer to $5 to $50. I don’t know what the average cost of a single item on Amazon is, but use that figure in the first paragraph, and it won’t yield anything like a million bucks. It might not yield $80,000.
Firstly, Amazon has “Amazon Warehouse” items where returned things are sold for vastly less then their original price. Um, make that “somewhat less”. Okay, okay, for a couple bucks off the original price which often makes them more expensive than the item at it’s frequent sale price new.
Secondly, there are people out there who buy pallet loads of returns from companies such as Amazon. They sort thru them and then resell them based on value, condition, etc. Some of these folk post “un-palletting” videos on YouTube.
So, no, Amazon doesn’t make it a policy to not take returns all the time. The OP’s example does stand out as unexpected.
That’s a good point. They already have staff that restocks and resells items. Most Prime purchases can be returned for full value. I’ve bought shirts that are the wrong size and Amazon pays for return shipping.
Now, I understand that the free return policy coupled with a “you just keep it” business model would fail pretty quickly as word gets around, but it does show that there is company infrastructure in place to handle these items.
To answer the other question, I did not look up the item myself, but the family member said that she looked up the item and that they were selling as of the date she checked for $499 each…and as I said, she got two of them.
I was responding to post #2 which stated that there were “thousands of stories out there like this.” And by “like this” I assumed higher value items, not a $5 spatula. Likewise, these tablets were not opened by my family member; they were in the same condition as she received them. I don’t think it would be misleading to say that they were new.
This has reminded me of a purchase about 6 years ago. I bought a wireless router (Netgear I think) and everything was fine with it except that from the power supply, they had included a 220V European-style plug instead of the US 110V style. I’m remembering that it was something like $50. The power supply from my old Netflix router worked just fine and I responded to the purchase simply asking them to send the US style adapter as a replacement in case I needed it.
Amazon replied and asked me if I would like a refund or a replacement item (as in the whole thing). I replied that I wanted neither, that it was working, I didn’t want to disconnect it and send it back while it was replaced, and that a full refund wasn’t necessary because it was working. They replied with the same “sorry for your inconvenience” and that they had refunded my money.
But that was well less than $100 and I just assumed that the customer service didn’t have the technical knowledge to determine exactly what I was talking about and separating the two items was enough of a hassle just to make a customer happy and be done with it. Nothing like this.
Note: I was referring to idea that Amazon never accepting returns since they don’t want to bother reselling the items. NOT that Amazon sometimes doesn’t take returns (and gives a refund) or that returns are trashed.
Myself, I’ve three times gotten something for free from Amazon since they didn’t want to bother with a return. But that’s a small fraction of the items I attempted to return and they are fairly low value.
My surprise is Amazon doing this for something so expensive.
Breville is another company that seemingly just gives away profit sometimes. I bought a $300 convection toaster oven from them through Amazon in 2016. Last year, it conked out. I called Breville and they said “give us $75 and we’ll see if we can fix it; and we’ll pay for the shipping; and if we can’t fix it, we’ll send you a new one”. So I shipped it to them, and it got lost/stolen in the process. I called them (because I hadn’t gotten a delivery confirmation), they checked with FedEx and said “Yup, it’s MIA, we’ll send you a new one.” They now have a customer for life.
A large company I worked for was an Amazon vendor, where Amazon buys the product outright and then resells it. Amazon charges an add-on fee of 20% to cover product damage/returns, regardless of whose fault it was.
They don’t need to refund the purchase price of a return, because they’ve already been paid for it.