Exactly. What he did was no different than picking up the new one and walking out the door with it.
People like to complain about stores return policies, checking receipts at the door, restocking fees, etc. etc. but what they don’t realize is that most of these resulted as a reaction to people abusing the system. People like your friend have ruined it for everyone making the days of “the customer is always right” turn into “the customer is never to be trusted and will always try to find a loophole”.
I’ve got stories a plenty from my retail days of people returning stereo boxes with bricks inside carefully taped up so they look like the original seal, people returning expensive perfume where they refilled the bottle with 95% water, people buying big ticket items sending in the barcode for their $100 rebate and then trying to return the item, etc. etc. etc.
Most people are honest but there are more than a few F*CKERS who like to screw it up for everyone.
Reminds me of the “my friend works at a drivethrough and decided to charge every car an extra quarter is that wrong?” and about half of all the other threads that particular poster started.
To me the difference is that the fish tank hadn’t been “really” used and was usable for someone else “as is”. This time, the returned part was unusable.
We had a situation at work, years ago, where my boss had ordered an oil pump writing in the wrong code. It should have been a 7, he wrote a 1. Oops.
So, we received the pump, realized it was not what he’d wanted, saw it was our error, filled their “reason for return form” and sent it back saying “sorry, our fault so of course we’re paying shipping costs both ways, please let us know if there are any restocking fees. Our apologies.”
Six months later, we get a call from their customer service. The form we’d sent did not have a checkmark for either Yes or No in response to “has this pump been emptied of oil and cleaned?” - we’d made a remark under Remarks: “the pump never contained any oil, so there is no need to empty and clean. It is clean and has never left its box.”
The option “no need to clean” was not acceptable to whomever made decisions there, so the solution was to mark “Yes”. Which was a lie but allowed them to put the pump back on a shelf…
The point of being dishonest or honest is not really how I’m viewed by others. I just told him, “you’re the one who has to sleep tonight.” It’s one thing if he did something in the office and then told the boss it was me, but pretty harmless to my name doing what he did. If it ever comes up, I know where to find him.
To other points: he supposedly carefully removed the plastic “straps” they put around the cardboard box so that he could slide them back onto the box so that they wouldn’t look into the box.
There was a story last year in Maryland where a guy did that with BABY FORMULA. Somehow he removed the label from a cardboard cylinder, drilled a hole in the canister, made the switch with flour, and covered the hole back up with the label. Baby Formula.
(I can’t find the link in the Sun’s archives, but I did find my email exchange with a friend about it)
Well, in reality his office mate says to me one day, “my faucet broke, and so I got this new one and yadda yadda yadda.”
So, I went off on him and concluded, “you’re joking right?”
Then, they let on it was actually theify, not the first guy. So,
I don’t think he was really going to tell me.
Once I went off on the ethics of it, I think he assumed this braggadocious posture as a sort of defense mechanism.
He seems to see so little wrong with it that it says nothing about how he sees my character. Although, I assume he wouldn’t tell his priest.
It’s really soiled him in my eyes. He always kind of had something sneaky lurking beneath the surface, but I never got into it because he’s a weak minded dude who drips low self-esteem.