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A few months ago, a men’s suit jacket appeared on my doorstep. What I had actually ordered was a pink dress. I emailed the retailer, and thus began a weeks-long back-and-forth involving photos of the jacket, photos of tags, and check-ins with customer-service representatives. For the first time in my online-shopping life, I was facing a truly inconvenient return process. The company, it seemed, was going to great lengths to ensure I wasn’t trying to defraud them.
After enjoying years of easy and free returns as the norm of online shopping, I was surprised by this experience. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been: Retailers, dealing with the high costs of rampant returns since the start of the pandemic, plus a growing problem of return fraud, have begun to issue stricter, sometimes byzantine, return policies and processes over the past few years. You can return that shirt, an e-commerce site might say, but only within a 14-day window, or only for store credit. Yes, you can bring back that toaster, but you’ll need to deliver it to a local shop—a practice that’s known in industry terms as BORIS, or “buy online, return in store.”
Return fraud—when people claim they never received a package that in fact arrived, or send back a shoebox full of rocks—is starting to mess with retailers’ operations. To some extent, fraudsters have ruined the fun for rule-abiding customers. When companies put in place policies to deter the worst offenders, “average consumers get caught in that too,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, told me. (I saw that myself in my jacket-dress back-and-forth.) Still, fraud on its own didn’t lead us here. Returns ballooned during the pandemic, when people were shopping online prodigiously, and have kept growing: Total returns are expected to hit nearly $900 billion in 2024, compared with $309 billion in 2019. The average return rate was about 8 percent in 2019, then almost 11 percent in 2020. By 2021, the rate was above 16 percent; that’s about where returns are projected to be this year, too, according to surveys from the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns, a UPS company.
Free returns are the second-most-popular reason people shop with a given retailer, according to a 2024 Forrester survey (the first is free shipping). But stores are trying to make returns worth it for themselves, too. In addition to more complex return policies, some stores, such as REI, JCPenney, and DSW, are putting the onus on online shoppers by way of return or shipping fees (last year, one logistics company estimated that 40 percent of retailers were adding such fees). Restrictive return policies have the potential to deter shoppers, although it’s too soon to say for certain if new rules have had any cumulative effect on shopping habits. Retailers need to balance the risk of some potentially annoyed customers with the massive costs of returns, Kodali noted. A single return of a $100 item can cost a store up to $30, according to one estimate—so this may be a trade-off brands are willing to make. And though people signal in surveys that they notice and care about free returns, shoppers may well gripe but keep spending.
The customer is famously always right—and for generations, going back to the early days of big-chain-store shopping, American retailers offered generous return policies in the hopes of keeping shoppers happy. People started getting accustomed to the idea that they could buy lots and return some (and that, in many cases, even a damaged or used item could be brought back in exchange for cash). The rise of Amazon and Zappos supercharged the dynamic of stores wooing shoppers to spend by absorbing the costs of returns. But in the current world of online retail—now that consumers are sending back more and more of what they buy online, totaling many billions of dollars in lost revenue for the stores—that logic has been tested.
The reality of returns is expensive, and it’s also ugly. In many cases, your unwanted sandals or skirt won’t be going to the next stylish customer. They are likely going in the trash—many retailers determine that the cost of vetting and repackaging merchandise is too high to be worth it. As Amanda Mull explained in The Atlantic in 2021, though some out-of-season or late-in-the-trend-cycle returned goods are sent to the T.J.Maxxes and Marshalls of the world for a second life, every year billions of pounds of returns are thrown away in the United States. Dealing with returns is so expensive and annoying that some 60 percent of retailers are issuing refunds and telling customers to just keep cheap goods rather than send them back.
Many shoppers aren’t happy about seeing their free-returns rights rolled back. But the old way was not sustainable in any sense of the word. The returns clampdown echoes the so-called end of the Millennial-lifestyle subsidy in the early 2020s, when services such as Uber were no longer subsidized by venture capitalists, and consumers had to pay full price for what they were once getting at a discount. Luring shoppers in with pricing perks and overconvenience can only last for so long. Eventually, reality sets in.
Related:
Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
- In a secret vote earlier this month, the House Ethics Committee agreed to release the report into the alleged misconduct and illegal activity of former Representative Matt Gaetz, according to CNN.
- House Republicans released a report recommending that the FBI investigate former Representative Liz Cheney over her work on the January 6 subcommittee.
- California declared a state of emergency over bird flu, which has been detected in 645 herds of dairy cattle in the state, according to officials. Governor Gavin Newsom called the decision a “proactive action.”
More From The Atlantic
Evening Read
12 Years Later, Two Different Tales of Grief for Sandy Hook Parents
By John Hendrickson
On the night of his daughter’s death, Robbie Parker remembered the Christmas cards. Back at home, hours after his 6-year-old had been murdered in her classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary, he thought about the portrait: he and his wife Alissa, posing with their three little girls, Madeline, Samantha, and Emilie. Alissa had mailed all the cards the day before.
Amid the shock and chaos, Robbie couldn’t stand the thought of their friends and family opening the envelopes and seeing Emilie, his deceased first grader.
Read the full article.
Culture Break
Watch (or skip). The Wild Robot (available to rent online) is a heartwarming but heavy-handed fable about the primacy of human values, Elvia Wilk writes.
Debate. Why do big families get such a bad rap? “I have many siblings. And in so many ways, my life is richer for it,” Stephanie H. Murray writes.
Play our daily crossword.
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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