1 00:00:00,680 --> 00:00:02,790 Do you ever wish you could undo the past? 2 00:00:02,790 --> 00:00:06,069 Un-fail your finals, un-sprain your ankle, un-join the mob? 3 00:00:06,069 --> 00:00:07,069 We’ve all been there. 4 00:00:07,069 --> 00:00:10,219 But in this life, we must live with our bad choices. 5 00:00:10,219 --> 00:00:15,219 Well… unless that bad choice was, I dunno, ordering a $370 bounce house because you dream 6 00:00:15,219 --> 00:00:18,770 of endless water fun—not to mention a perfect dinner party with friends—but you ordered 7 00:00:18,770 --> 00:00:21,080 it at 3am and when it arrives, you realize that 1. 8 00:00:21,080 --> 00:00:22,910 You’re too old to use it, 2. 9 00:00:22,910 --> 00:00:25,330 You’re intimidated by the ripped gorilla, and 3. 10 00:00:25,330 --> 00:00:27,510 You don’t have a dinner party’s worth of friends. 11 00:00:27,510 --> 00:00:31,320 Un-making that bad choice is usually both frictionless and free, thanks to what’s 12 00:00:31,320 --> 00:00:35,739 known as the “reverse supply chain,” or the massive, sprawling industry that exists 13 00:00:35,739 --> 00:00:40,610 to handle returns, exchanges, repairs, overstock, and all the other bits and bobs floating around 14 00:00:40,610 --> 00:00:42,559 the late-capitalist reject bin. 15 00:00:42,559 --> 00:00:43,559 Wrong color? 16 00:00:43,559 --> 00:00:44,559 Doesn’t fit? 17 00:00:44,559 --> 00:00:45,559 Won’t turn on? 18 00:00:45,559 --> 00:00:49,379 Toss it in a box, slap a label on, drop it off, goodbye forever. 19 00:00:49,379 --> 00:00:56,539 In 2022, the good people of the US of A returned a total of $817 billion worth of stuff. 20 00:00:56,539 --> 00:01:00,250 That is twice the GDP of Malaysia… that’s pretty huge. 21 00:01:00,250 --> 00:01:02,829 Reall y makes you wonder what they’re doing in Second Malaysia. 22 00:01:02,829 --> 00:01:08,259 The general online shopping return rate is estimated around 20%, though it varies by 23 00:01:08,259 --> 00:01:09,259 industry. 24 00:01:09,259 --> 00:01:11,420 In clothing, for example, it can be as high as 40%. 25 00:01:11,420 --> 00:01:15,950 I mean, even the writer of this video—who’s really on her high horse about “not using 26 00:01:15,950 --> 00:01:20,569 Amazon”—made five purchases there this year… and got refunds for 40% of them. 27 00:01:20,569 --> 00:01:23,970 And no, I don’t know why she needed two alarm clocks, twelve combination locks, and 28 00:01:23,970 --> 00:01:25,310 a bag of stackable cats. 29 00:01:25,310 --> 00:01:26,580 My best guess is women… 30 00:01:26,580 --> 00:01:27,900 be… shopping? 31 00:01:27,900 --> 00:01:32,490 And even though consumers seldom pay for them anymore, all those returns are expensive. 32 00:01:32,490 --> 00:01:36,619 If you’re returning something heavy, the cost the seller takes on to ship it back where 33 00:01:36,619 --> 00:01:40,740 it came from, then to wherever it gets resold, refurbished, or burned for fuel can be higher 34 00:01:40,740 --> 00:01:43,420 than the cost of just letting you keep it and cutting their losses. 35 00:01:43,420 --> 00:01:47,740 In the mattress industry, where you can’t resell anything, they still offer returns 36 00:01:47,740 --> 00:01:50,899 even though it eats up nearly 10% of their sales. 37 00:01:50,899 --> 00:01:54,250 So why do companies take such a huge loss on returns? 38 00:01:54,250 --> 00:01:58,700 Well, because ours is a world of commitment-phobes, and companies that don’t cater to that pay 39 00:01:58,700 --> 00:02:01,240 a higher price than ones that do. 40 00:02:01,240 --> 00:02:05,770 In a 2018 survey, a hilarious 69% of online shoppers said they’d feel less inclined 41 00:02:05,770 --> 00:02:08,319 to buy if they knew they had to pay for return shipping. 42 00:02:08,319 --> 00:02:10,360 So no returns, no customers. 43 00:02:10,360 --> 00:02:14,569 That’s why the reverse supply chain is so big, but how does it actually work? 44 00:02:14,569 --> 00:02:18,200 Naturally, it varies by retailer, but for the sake of this hypothetical, we’re gonna 45 00:02:18,200 --> 00:02:21,590 say that you’re returning an UPMSX portable blender to Amazon. 46 00:02:21,590 --> 00:02:25,860 Assuming they actually make you send it back, you drop it off and never think about it again. 47 00:02:25,860 --> 00:02:31,000 But now, the fine UPMSXians at UPMSX have to make a choice: they could do four things 48 00:02:31,000 --> 00:02:35,970 with your blender, and when there’s four possible paths, you enter—you guessed it—the 49 00:02:35,970 --> 00:02:37,270 Blenderverse. 50 00:02:37,270 --> 00:02:39,510 Blenderverse 1: Return to seller. 51 00:02:39,510 --> 00:02:43,530 This one’s what you’d hope happens to most stuff: UPMSX gets their blender back, 52 00:02:43,530 --> 00:02:47,370 finds that it’s completely functional and unopened, and says “hey, we can just resell 53 00:02:47,370 --> 00:02:50,959 this bad boy,” so Amazon ships it out again next time someone—possibly you, as you’re 54 00:02:50,959 --> 00:02:55,569 so terribly indecisive—buys it and, one-in-five chance, re-returns it, at which point it might 55 00:02:55,569 --> 00:02:56,750 head to… 56 00:02:56,750 --> 00:02:59,310 Blenderverse 2: Disposal. 57 00:02:59,310 --> 00:03:02,190 This is both what it sounds like and not what it sounds like. 58 00:03:02,190 --> 00:03:06,230 Amazon would like you to know that they don’t send anything to a landfill… though their 59 00:03:06,230 --> 00:03:07,830 middlemen definitely do. 60 00:03:07,830 --> 00:03:11,680 But disposal doesn’t just mean landfill, it also covers recycling, or burning it for 61 00:03:11,680 --> 00:03:16,659 fuel—that wasn’t a joke before—or, on the less upsetting side, donating it. 62 00:03:16,659 --> 00:03:20,709 Donation is only an option for US-based sellers, but those who choose to do it send their stuff 63 00:03:20,709 --> 00:03:22,830 to a network that distributes it to charities. 64 00:03:22,830 --> 00:03:25,880 But somewhere between destruction and do-gooding, there’s… 65 00:03:25,880 --> 00:03:29,379 Blenderverse 3: FBA Grade and Resell. 66 00:03:29,379 --> 00:03:35,300 This is an exclusive, invite-only option that UPMSX may or may not actually have, but here’s 67 00:03:35,300 --> 00:03:36,340 how it works. 68 00:03:36,340 --> 00:03:40,590 FBA—which stands for Fulfillment by Amazon and not, as I’d assumed, Funky Blender Adjudicators—will 69 00:03:40,590 --> 00:03:44,520 take a look at your blender and grade it on a scale from “New” to “Acceptable,” 70 00:03:44,520 --> 00:03:48,090 and then sell it as such on Amazon spinoffs like Warehouse Deals or Woot!. 71 00:03:48,090 --> 00:03:53,430 This universe is all well and good, but it’s two things I don’t like: invite-only and 72 00:03:53,430 --> 00:03:54,430 sorta blasé. 73 00:03:54,430 --> 00:03:56,349 So let’s hop over to… 74 00:03:56,349 --> 00:03:58,879 Blenderverse 4: Liquidation. 75 00:03:58,879 --> 00:04:01,770 This is where they throw all the blenders in a bigger blender to make blender juice 76 00:04:01,770 --> 00:04:03,540 which will help you get ripped for summer. 77 00:04:03,540 --> 00:04:07,470 Okay, that was a lie—liquidation is instead a weird cousin of an option that only gets 78 00:04:07,470 --> 00:04:11,319 the seller about 5% of the resale price for the product, but if you don’t want to send 79 00:04:11,319 --> 00:04:14,370 it to the eternal flame, this may be the best option. 80 00:04:14,370 --> 00:04:18,650 In this universe, your blender gets bundled with all of UPMSX’s other excess inventory 81 00:04:18,650 --> 00:04:22,460 and sold to a liquidator, whose job it is to figure out how to make money on it. 82 00:04:22,460 --> 00:04:26,550 Some of them repair the stuff—fix wonky parts, remove stains, all that—then distribute 83 00:04:26,550 --> 00:04:29,840 them to secondary sellers like outlet stores or flea markets. 84 00:04:29,840 --> 00:04:33,479 Sometimes, if the repair is too complicated to be worth it to the liquidator, they’ll 85 00:04:33,479 --> 00:04:37,830 sell the broken thing even further downstream, like to a guy in Alabama who buys and fixes 86 00:04:37,830 --> 00:04:40,050 busted air conditioners and sells them locally. 87 00:04:40,050 --> 00:04:43,919 Or, sometimes, they just bundle massive amounts of random stuff and sell it for fifteen cents 88 00:04:43,919 --> 00:04:47,100 on the dollar on an auction site, and we’re not gonna spend too much time on the auction 89 00:04:47,100 --> 00:04:51,070 sites because HAI topics have been taking me to a lot of auction sites lately and I 90 00:04:51,070 --> 00:04:54,690 really can’t afford to—OOH, A MISCELLANEOUS PALLET OF ELECTRONICS COMMUNICATION NETWORK 91 00:04:54,690 --> 00:04:55,690 CONSUMER GOODS?? 92 00:04:55,690 --> 00:04:56,690 I’ve gotta—no. 93 00:04:56,690 --> 00:04:57,690 I won’t. 94 00:04:57,690 --> 00:04:59,820 They don’t do returns, anyway. 95 00:04:59,820 --> 00:05:01,570 And so ends our tour of the Blenderverse. 96 00:05:01,570 --> 00:05:05,870 If this all sounds a little wasteful or overcomplicated, that’s because it is. 97 00:05:05,870 --> 00:05:09,770 The returns industry keeps a lot of people employed, and some stuff from going to waste, 98 00:05:09,770 --> 00:05:13,610 but it’d be a whole lot simpler to just not buy stuff that you don’t need. 99 00:05:13,610 --> 00:05:16,500 Because the best way to undo the past… is to redo your future. 100 00:05:16,500 --> 00:05:18,940 Ohh, that’s good, I could sell that on a mug. 101 00:05:18,940 --> 00:05:21,050 Did someone write that down? 102 00:05:21,050 --> 00:05:25,690 Now, short little knowledge nuggets like that can actually be super impactful to the entire 103 00:05:25,690 --> 00:05:27,280 course of your life. 104 00:05:27,280 --> 00:05:30,790 The problem is that getting those knowledge nuggets can be tough—you often have to read 105 00:05:30,790 --> 00:05:34,760 an entire book, which is great, but for many people very hard to make time for. 106 00:05:34,760 --> 00:05:39,220 And let’s be honest, even once you do, it’s really hard to maintain focus with today’s 107 00:05:39,220 --> 00:05:40,220 attention spans. 108 00:05:40,220 --> 00:05:44,539 But our sponsor, Imprint, is a new way to learn—they offer bite-sized courses that 109 00:05:44,539 --> 00:05:46,260 you can easily fit into your day. 110 00:05:46,260 --> 00:05:50,030 They’re designed to be super-digestible and, with their highly visual style, they 111 00:05:50,030 --> 00:05:53,720 help you stay focused and engaged so you actually remember things long-term. 112 00:05:53,720 --> 00:05:57,840 And they offer these courses on a huge range of subjects—both ones you should learn for 113 00:05:57,840 --> 00:06:01,620 the impact they can have on you personally, like health, wellness, self-help, philosophy, 114 00:06:01,620 --> 00:06:05,100 and more; and ones that you might be interested to learn for personal or career growth, like 115 00:06:05,100 --> 00:06:08,410 business, finance, science, technology, history, and more. 116 00:06:08,410 --> 00:06:12,790 Basically, Imprint is a way to use your screen-time in a far healthier, more productive way which 117 00:06:12,790 --> 00:06:16,970 is perhaps why they have over 30,000 five-star reviews on the app store. 118 00:06:16,970 --> 00:06:22,180 So if you want to start learning in the small moments of your day, you can head to imprintapp.com/HAI 119 00:06:22,180 --> 00:06:27,440 to get a seven day free trial, and the first 200 subscribers will also get 20% off an annual 120 00:06:27,440 --> 00:06:28,060 membership.