The legal term is puffery. The claim generally has to be something vague rather than specific - for example “The longest-lasting light bulb on the market” would likely not be actionable, but “Lasts 200,000 hours” would be. [I am not a lawyer, but I was a juror on a case where this was explained at painful length by experts.]
As mentioned by others, outfits like The Retail Equation track “frequent returners” as well as other questionable behavior (purchasing an item with a credit card, returning it without receipt for store credit, using that to purchase something else and then returning that item with receipt for a cash refund).
Amazon and other merchants with a time-limited refund policy do this because they have determined it is good for business and the few abuses don’t matter enough in the big picture.
A “lifetime warranty” may or may not be infinite. The consumer may not have the original receipt (if required), the company may go out of business, etc. Some companies go out of their way to be difficult - one manufacturer of computer tape media advertises a lifetime warranty, but makes you provide the serial numbers when requesting a RMA. They will try to reject media as “too old” (implying it was worn out, which is not covered). I’ve had to argue with them multiple times that I am not responsible for the inventory rotation policies of their distributors if I get some media that has been sitting on a shelf for years. The whole thing was annoying enough that I purchased a new tape library and media from another manufacturer and never want to deal with the first manufacturer ever again.
Forty some years ago, I worked for a potato chip company. We would get phone calls/letters saying that they had found a nut or bolt in a bag of chips. (It happened; the machines that filled them used vibrating chutes, and despite a regular schedule of checking nuts & bolts, occasionally one dropped into a bag. No problem, they were stainless steel and oiled with a food-grade edible lubricant.)
The standard response was to request that they mail it to us, along with the bag if they still had that. When it arrived, they went to our ‘quality control department’ and she (1 person) did several things:
put the nut/bold/whatever into a box that went to the maintenance crew.
if the bag was included, recorded the production date/time stamped on it.
sent them a Thank-you letter, including a free coupon redeemable at any grocery store for two large size bags of our chips, and postage stamps equal to the amount they had spent mailing it in.
recorded their name, address, date, bag size, problem, etc. and filed it in a filing drawer. (Typed on a 3x5 card, it was that long ago.)
Most customers were quite happy with this response. But there were some who saw it as an opportunity to take advantage. They would begin sending in repeated complaint letters, sometimes including hardware that was not even the type or size used on our machines. But these were caught, because of the record kept of problem letters.
The policy was that after 3 complaints within a short time (like the same year), they got a much less friendly response, with no free coupons enclosed, and a statement like “since you have so many problems with our product, we suggest that you may be more satisfied in the future if you purchase some other brand of potato chips”.
Even so, such customers were pretty infrequent. Easily outweighed by the others, who were quite pleased by our response, and who told others how we stood behind our product. Quite worthwhile for the company.
I don’t return a whole lot of stuff. But I’ve worked returns before and there are periods throughout the year where I seem to always have to make a trip to the return counter every time I go to the store. I’m experienced, but not habitual. I pay a lot with cash, too, especially for purchases that aren’t essential or are iffy. Cash helps expedite the return process, since you don’t have to checkup on credit to your card or who knows what may happen with a check. I am never asked for identification when I submit a return to a brick and mortar store. Not at the grocery, not at Walmart, not at the Home Improvement store, not a clothing store. I always keep my receipts though, especially for something I think may be returned. I worked home improvement once, and the only time we had to have ID was if someone was trying to return anything over $80 with no receipt. Even if they didn’t have the receipt, we could cross-reference by credit card/check, or they had the opportunity to leave a phone number. If they paid cash and didn’t leave a number, then we went to the ID request in case the return was later discovered to be fraudulent. On small dollar stuff, we were told to just refund or exchange and never get into an argument. We didn’t want to insult the customer and risk losing their business.
I suspect these return tracking companies are claiming they know more than they really do. Their service might be helpful to stores that sell really expensive clothes to people that wear them once and return them every weekend, but probably not so much defense against the guy that does a return at the department store and hops over to the home improvement warehouse and so on down the line. And we did have workers that would take returns on power tools that were later discovered to be a box of rocks. If the guy at the return counter isn’t bright enough to open the box, he’s not going to be bright enough to follow policy and get the ID. Or else it was an inside job.
You pretty much have it. The area in which advertisers usually face legal challenges (and why you so rarely see this sort of claim) is in direct product comparisons, such as "Consumers prefer Brand X over Brand Y’. A company which makes that sort of claim in advertising will invariably have their claim challenged immediately by the competitor (such claims typically go to the FTC).
A company which is going to make that sort of claim will have been advised by their legal staff to have done a particular form of market research study specifically to support that claim. While the FTC has no hard-and-fast rules on this sort of research, there are some well-agreed-upon rules of thumb on that research (number of respondents, number of cities in which the research is done, etc.), all of which make it a very expensive piece of research – so much so that, in the 26 years in which I’ve worked in this industry, while I’ve had probably a dozen clients consider doing it, not one has actually followed through with the research (nor actually made that sort of advertising claim.
One of my managers had a ~$500 spigot in a sealed beer bottle on his desk for a while. How it got out to a customer without being noticed was a mistory to all, but engineering management wasn’t particularly impressed.
We provide a 4 year warrenty to our retailers. They are responsible for a 3 year warrenty. Mostly we don’t have warrenty failurse, and mostly they don’t leave stuff in stock for a year. It hasn’t been a problem. But if you did try to get a warrenty repair from us more than 4 years after manufacture, it would be annoying.
In the aftermarket automotive parts industry, it seems to me that the “lifetime warranty” parts are often made as cheaply as possible, then sold at a higher price due to the warranty. The cheap cost of manufacture allows a profit even though a fair number of warranty replacements happen. A good business case, perhaps, but the store isn’t supplying the labor. After the third such water pump, I got a rebuilt OEM unit, which has so-far lasted as long as three of the lifetime warranty units.
They also factor in how long people keep cars, especially after they start needing parts replaced. NAPA really didn’t think I’d still be driving that car 22 years after I bought the lifetime brake pads! Even non-thermal ink fades pretty badly on a receipt that old.
The short answer is that nobody* ever returns a mattress after 90 days. I hardly ever get around to returning poorly fitting or defective clothing, let alone stuff that needs to be shipped. Nobody* will keep the gigantic box it came in because it takes up too much space, and with or without the box shipping a mattress is a collossal pain in the rear. So if you take delivery of the mattress, they can pretty much mark you down as a final sale.
They would have a garage sale every month. This was to resell the returned items. A lot of great buys there.
My daughter once asked REI if they ever refused a return. This was before the return change of policy. The employe said she could remember only one time. A customer returned a sleeping bag. When asked why it was being returned, the customer said, “My dog peed on it”. They refused the return.
I bought an L.L Bean backpack for my daughter when she was in high school. It was monogrammed with her initials. When it came, she wasn’t happy with the color. I called them, and they sent a new one in her color, free of charge, and told me to keep the old one. That’s great service.
Many years L L Bean sold shirts sewn with a gusset under the arm (a design feature that gives better fit and mobility). Great service would be if they still sold shirts like that…