Last year, consumers in the United States returned $743 billion worth of merchandise, which amounts to 14.5 percent of all things purchased.
That’s an increase from 10.6 percent in 2020, according to the National Retail Federation.
This is exceptionally expensive for retailers. Given that a business must bear the costs of returning an unwanted good—including shipping, sorting, warehousing, and then all the work of selling the returned product to a discount wholesaler or the trash—this can seriously eat into profits.
Calibrating when to offer a refund, when to insist on a return, and how to identify customers abusing the system is now a new area of strategy and financial modeling for retailers.
But here is my greatest concern when it comes to returns:
Time.
Returning an item takes time. In many cases, it takes just as long to return an item as it does to purchase it, but after returning it, you’re left with nothing to show for the time spent both purchasing and returning.
You’ve essentially spent your precious time for nothing.
And that word — precious — is critical because, for many people, as much as they may see time as precious, they do not treat time preciously. They claim to value their time, but when you examine how they spend it, it’s clear that what they say and believe are two very different things.
They make thoughtless, careless, impulse purchases, confident that if they don’t like the item, they can simply return it for a refund, failing to factor in the time required to do so when making the purchase.
In many cases, they view purchases as rent-to-buy scenarios, wherein they take possession of an item with the option to purchase permanently but also the ability to recoup their rental price with the return of the item.
But all of this takes time.
Precious time.
Precious time too often treated like it is worthless.
With 14% of all purchases being returned in this country, an enormous amount of time is spent repackaging, driving to stores, post offices, and UPS outlets, waiting in lines, and explaining to customer service representatives why an item wasn’t just right.
This is what bothers me most about the magnitude of returns in this country.
The profit loss for companies is staggering.
The life lost for consumers is unfathomable.
