Do you ever wish you could undo the past?
Un-fail your finals, un-sprain your ankle, un-join the mob?
We’ve all been there.
But in this life, we must live with our bad choices.
Well… unless that bad choice was, I dunno, ordering a $370 bounce house because you dream
of endless water fun—not to mention a perfect dinner party with friends—but you ordered
it at 3am and when it arrives, you realize that 1.
You’re too old to use it, 2.
You’re intimidated by the ripped gorilla, and 3.
You don’t have a dinner party’s worth of friends.
Un-making that bad choice is usually both frictionless and free, thanks to what’s
known as the “reverse supply chain,” or the massive, sprawling industry that exists
to handle returns, exchanges, repairs, overstock, and all the other bits and bobs floating around
the late-capitalist reject bin.
Wrong color?
Doesn’t fit?
Won’t turn on?
Toss it in a box, slap a label on, drop it off, goodbye forever.
In 2022, the good people of the US of A returned a total of $817 billion worth of stuff.
That is twice the GDP of Malaysia… that’s pretty huge.
Reall y makes you wonder what they’re doing in Second Malaysia.
The general online shopping return rate is estimated around 20%, though it varies by
industry.
In clothing, for example, it can be as high as 40%.
I mean, even the writer of this video—who’s really on her high horse about “not using
Amazon”—made five purchases there this year… and got refunds for 40% of them.
And no, I don’t know why she needed two alarm clocks, twelve combination locks, and
a bag of stackable cats.
My best guess is women…
be… shopping?
And even though consumers seldom pay for them anymore, all those returns are expensive.
If you’re returning something heavy, the cost the seller takes on to ship it back where
it came from, then to wherever it gets resold, refurbished, or burned for fuel can be higher
than the cost of just letting you keep it and cutting their losses.
In the mattress industry, where you can’t resell anything, they still offer returns
even though it eats up nearly 10% of their sales.
So why do companies take such a huge loss on returns?
Well, because ours is a world of commitment-phobes, and companies that don’t cater to that pay
a higher price than ones that do.
In a 2018 survey, a hilarious 69% of online shoppers said they’d feel less inclined
to buy if they knew they had to pay for return shipping.
So no returns, no customers.
That’s why the reverse supply chain is so big, but how does it actually work?
Naturally, it varies by retailer, but for the sake of this hypothetical, we’re gonna
say that you’re returning an UPMSX portable blender to Amazon.
Assuming they actually make you send it back, you drop it off and never think about it again.
But now, the fine UPMSXians at UPMSX have to make a choice: they could do four things
with your blender, and when there’s four possible paths, you enter—you guessed it—the
Blenderverse.
Blenderverse 1: Return to seller.
This one’s what you’d hope happens to most stuff: UPMSX gets their blender back,
finds that it’s completely functional and unopened, and says “hey, we can just resell
this bad boy,” so Amazon ships it out again next time someone—possibly you, as you’re
so terribly indecisive—buys it and, one-in-five chance, re-returns it, at which point it might
head to…
Blenderverse 2: Disposal.
This is both what it sounds like and not what it sounds like.
Amazon would like you to know that they don’t send anything to a landfill… though their
middlemen definitely do.
But disposal doesn’t just mean landfill, it also covers recycling, or burning it for
fuel—that wasn’t a joke before—or, on the less upsetting side, donating it.
Donation is only an option for US-based sellers, but those who choose to do it send their stuff
to a network that distributes it to charities.
But somewhere between destruction and do-gooding, there’s…
Blenderverse 3: FBA Grade and Resell.
This is an exclusive, invite-only option that UPMSX may or may not actually have, but here’s
how it works.
FBA—which stands for Fulfillment by Amazon and not, as I’d assumed, Funky Blender Adjudicators—will
take a look at your blender and grade it on a scale from “New” to “Acceptable,”
and then sell it as such on Amazon spinoffs like Warehouse Deals or Woot!.
This universe is all well and good, but it’s two things I don’t like: invite-only and
sorta blasé.
So let’s hop over to…
Blenderverse 4: Liquidation.
This is where they throw all the blenders in a bigger blender to make blender juice
which will help you get ripped for summer.
Okay, that was a lie—liquidation is instead a weird cousin of an option that only gets
the seller about 5% of the resale price for the product, but if you don’t want to send
it to the eternal flame, this may be the best option.
In this universe, your blender gets bundled with all of UPMSX’s other excess inventory
and sold to a liquidator, whose job it is to figure out how to make money on it.
Some of them repair the stuff—fix wonky parts, remove stains, all that—then distribute
them to secondary sellers like outlet stores or flea markets.
Sometimes, if the repair is too complicated to be worth it to the liquidator, they’ll
sell the broken thing even further downstream, like to a guy in Alabama who buys and fixes
busted air conditioners and sells them locally.
Or, sometimes, they just bundle massive amounts of random stuff and sell it for fifteen cents
on the dollar on an auction site, and we’re not gonna spend too much time on the auction
sites because HAI topics have been taking me to a lot of auction sites lately and I
really can’t afford to—OOH, A MISCELLANEOUS PALLET OF ELECTRONICS COMMUNICATION NETWORK
CONSUMER GOODS??
I’ve gotta—no.
I won’t.
They don’t do returns, anyway.
And so ends our tour of the Blenderverse.
If this all sounds a little wasteful or overcomplicated, that’s because it is.
The returns industry keeps a lot of people employed, and some stuff from going to waste,
but it’d be a whole lot simpler to just not buy stuff that you don’t need.
Because the best way to undo the past… is to redo your future.
Ohh, that’s good, I could sell that on a mug.
Did someone write that down?
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