Every year when Susan takes her place at the Thanksgiving table in her Brooklyn home alongside friends and family, she is filled with gratitude.
One of things she is particularly grateful for is Target’s 90-day return policy as the past three holidays she’s bought, used and returned chairs to accommodate her extra dinner guests.
“I would love to keep them because each year it’s stressful to get the chairs, carry them home myself by hand and never knowing if they’ll have them in stock,” she confesses. “I also don’t have anyplace to store them,” she adds, an issue many New Yorkers struggle with.
“Each year I pray they still have the ones I like as I ride the escalator to the Home section. So far, I’m three for three,” though this year they only had two of the chairs in stock. “Next Thanksgiving, if Target no longer has my chairs, the invite may say BYOC (Bring Your Own Chair).”
To ensure the chairs remain in mint condition, Susan (who, like several other sources interviewed, asked to conceal her identity) tells The Post she keeps them in their original plastic wrap and is careful about which guests get to sit in them.
Others aren’t as concerned with the condition of the items they return, according to one New York Costco employee who says “people return tables and chairs after the holiday with cranberry sauce still on them.”‘If merchandise returns were a corporation, it would rank #3 on the Fortune 500 list.’
- The Retail Equation 2015 report
Serial returners — those who tend to treat purchased goods as if they’re loaner items, save every receipt and never, ever snip off a single tag lest they be unable to return their loot once they’re done with it — have long been lining up at the cashier, much to the chagrin of stores that lose profits on the returns, leading to crackdowns at some retailers.
The Costco employee says that of all the departments she worked in,”everything from membership to the register to assisting customers and handling returns. Returns is by far the worst and I always tell them to take me off returns … One time a gentleman wheeled in a three-piece brown sectional sofa and everyone working the registers hoped they wouldn’t have to deal with it. Of course, he came to my register and told me the sofa ‘didn’t work.’ I looked it up and he’d had it three years.”
But because Costco stands behind all their products, she took it back.
Other items she’s taken back with no questions asked include a 15-year-old kitchen mixer, books that have the telltale signs of being read as well as half-eaten meat, produce and snacks.
When it comes to seasonal merchandise, members can get even bolder. “They buy a winter wardrobe and return it in the spring for a spring wardrobe,” she reveals. “Every winter people come back and return blow-up pools and every summer they come in and return artificial Christmas trees. One guy even returned a tree with all the lights still on it because he couldn’t find the box and we took it all back. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this kind of stuff. I like to help members, but some things aren’t right.”
“If merchandise returns were a corporation, it would rank #3 on the Fortune 500 list,” according to a report by The Retail Equation, a group that uses data to predict and optimize sales and returns at more than 34,000 stores in North America.
Last year the amount of fraudulent and abusive return dollars within the US alone was an estimated $15.9 billion, according to the National Retail Federation, which surveyed more than 60 companies ranging from specialty and department stores to supermarkets, drugstores and discount stores.
Each tale of extreme returns is more daring than the next. One woman even tells The Post that she snagged her wedding dress for the low, low cost of free, thanks to a flexible return policy.
On the way to get hitched in Lake Tahoe in 1989, at the peak of what she calls her decades-long “addiction,” bride-to-be Ginny Scales Medeiros made a pit stop at the Fairfield, California, Macy’s store. She picked out a beautiful wedding dress, paid for it with her Macy’s credit card and walked down the aisle wearing it the next day. On the way home to Santa Rosa, California, she returned the dress and told the salesperson the wedding had been called off. She got a full refund.
Now, years later, Medeiros, the 49-year-old author of the novel “What Is Normal?,” based on her own rough-and-tumble life, tells The Post, “My moral compass was askew. Using the stores as my closet was how I operated. Everything in the store belonged to me as long as I returned it the next day. That was my normal. There was almost an addiction and jolt of adrenaline when I returned things. The holidays were the best. I would have a brand new outfit for every party I went to. I was never caught or confronted in all the years I did it.”
Today, Medeiros has changed her tune. “It was unethical. I camouflaged it as borrowing, but if someone doesn’t know you took it, I guess it’s just a glossy way of saying stealing,” she admits. “But it’s how I navigated the world, until I didn’t.”
Medeiros claims to have finally stopped in the mid-’90s, when her two sons, now 24 and 27, were old enough to catch on to her bad habit.
“Friendly fraud” or “wardrobing,” as the practice of buying items with the intention of returning them after use is often called, is nothing new, but it’s on the rise and significantly affecting sellers, buyers and some unexpected areas too.‘Using the stores as my closet was how I operated. Everything in the store belonged to me as long as I returned it the next day.’
“Retailers must offset the negative business impact of return fraud and abuse by increasing prices to consumers and by reducing costs — which too often means a loss of jobs,” according to a report by The Retail Equation.
Based on the group’s most recent survey, analyzing 2015 data, not only are people paying more at the register and losing jobs, state governments are losing $552 million to $962 million every year in sales tax revenues and another $134 million to $233 million at the local level. New York lost close to $17 million in 2015 at the state level.
In an effort to thwart this type of abuse, retailers are diligently tracking returns through high-tech systems such as The Retail Equation, resulting in refusing questionable returns from certain customers and, in extreme cases, banning consumers from shopping at their establishment.
Unlike Medeiros, Kelly, a 31-year-old from Seattle who is a regular shopper at Victoria’s Secret, says while she does return a considerable amount to the store, she doesn’t buy merchandise with the intention of using and returning it. She simply hates the idea of trying stuff on in the dressing room and having to deal with salespeople poking their head in the room while she’s undressed. To avoid the awkwardness, she buys a bunch of stuff, tries it on at home and returns what she doesn’t want with the tags still on. Last summer, her perfect system fell apart.
“I remember, I was at the counter trying to return some things one day and the salesgirl looked at the items, looked at her computer and then walked over to the manager. They were kind of rustling around and whispering and the next thing you know, I’m told I can only get store credit from now on. That was it. There was no real formal explanation. So, basically, they still let me shop there, but this way they kept my money in the store if I return anything,” she explains.
Recently, Kelly switched from her married name back to her maiden name and, to her delight, the tracking system didn’t recognize her, so for now, she’s back to getting cash refunds.
A quick search of the terms “Amazon.com +Ban” results in outraged customers who have been banned for life by the online retail giant for too many returns, though there is no written policy stating how many returns is too many.
With all of this going on, retailers find themselves between a rock and a hard place because one way to a loyal customer’s heart and to incentivize people to shop with them is hassle-free returns.
LL Bean, for example, is well known for its generous return policies. Spokesman Mac McKeever says it’s no accident that customers have been allowed to return thoroughly used items, years later, without a question.
“With our 100% satisfaction guarantee, we are the only company that completely empowers the customer to determine what satisfaction means to them. Our guarantee is not a liability, but rather a customer service asset, an unacknowledged agreement between us and the customer, that always puts the customer first and relies on the goodwill of our customers to honor the original intent of the guarantee,” he says.‘There have been some occasions when we have suggested a customer shop elsewhere, due to a repeated pattern of possible misuse of the guarantee.’
- LL Bean
There are, however, limits to this generosity: “There have been some occasions when we have suggested a customer shop elsewhere, due to a repeated pattern of possible misuse of the guarantee.”
Leon Rbibo, president of The Pearl Source, an online jewelry business that brings in $10 million of revenue annually, has already banned five customers this holiday season.
“Avoiding abusive customers is never a flawless system, but there are certain measures retailers can take to protect themselves,” he says. “In the end, these people are always caught. If it’s a serial returner looking to ‘wear and return,’ we’ll start seeing a pattern and cut them off from shopping with us. Put simply, the odds are very much stacked against these individuals.”
Not so stacked, according to repeat returners.
In a 2015 press release, American Express dubbed the day after Christmas “The New Black Friday,” saying the day has “arguably emerged as its own shopping holiday.” The busy atmosphere of the stores leads reformed serial returner Medeiros to recall the day fondly as a free-for-all for returns.
“Oh, December 26,” she says. “It was always one of my favorite days of the year because it was the so one of the easiest days to return things. The stores were so packed and the salespeople were so busy, you could get away with anything — and I did.”