I remember swinging by Home Depot just before a big winter storm. One of the sales guys mentioned that they didn't have any generators in stock because people would buy them, leave them in the box, and return them if they didn't lose power during the storm. Presumably, they wouldn't return the generators if they were actually used due to a power outage. I seriously doubt that Home Depot wanted their customers to do that. Large companies do sometimes keep track of how many returns people rack up over time to identify bad actors (that's much harder with "no receipt" or "no questions asked" policies).
On the other hand, Kragen advertises that they have a loaner tool program. It's essentially a liberal return policy, as long as you don't break the tool while trying to repair your car. I have used that, when I had a functioning tool to return when I was done with the job.
Yeah. The only things I've ever returned and didn't want replacements for were cheap junk. I took a gamble on a $5 pair of touchscreen gloves, and of course they were worthless (didn't work at all, and weren't even that warm), and I got my money back.
For parts like electronics, I of course want a replacement. I've had to RMA a motherboard and a hard drive in two separate instances over the past decade. In both cases I really wanted the replacements to ship quickly, because I was waiting on them to finish a build!
Amazon customers have the benefit of free returns, pretty much no questions asked within 30 days. I want to buy some commodity like an AC adapter or an SD card, I'll buy 3 or 4 different options and usually at least 1 of them will be OK, then I'll return the rest. If I only need 1 item and have multiple that work fine, I'll give positive reviews to the ones I return, which I feel is the least I can do for the seller.
With AirBNB and tourist traps, there are no refunds and the nature of the sale/service means you often can't find an alternative if you've decided to take the loss.
I'm in Australia. Although we're covered by what I consider to be pretty good consumer guarantees, you can still only demand a refund in the case of a "major problem" with the product.
I don't think simply being unhappy with it connecting outside would qualify, although IMO it should.
I bought a $1200 commercial generator through Amazon. Delivered by truck about in about 10 days. It had several problems. Took it to the local authorized service center myself. They struggled with it for about a month.
Ultimately they had me call the manufacturer for a replacement. I tried but the manufacturer sent me to Amazon for a refund. I did so and Amazon refunded the full purchase price immediately.
The service center didn't care; they still had a defective generator on their hands and kept working on it with the manufacturer on my behalf despite the fact that I had gotten a full refund, which I made clear to them. Ultimately the manufacturer decided they wanted the unit returned for analysis by their engineers and drop shipped a replacement to me knowing perfectly well that I'd already received a refund.
The replacement works perfectly. I got a $1200 commercial generator for 'free.' I'd have rather just had the working product in the first place, and I still feel like I've cheated somehow despite the fact that I was entirely above board with everyone.
I just did a return to Amazon where I bought a pair of GFCI adapters for power cords, and got a children’s book of Christian devotionals instead. Doubly useless because both my wife and I are childless and effectively atheist.
But that return was completely free of charge. We’re in Canada, if that counts, and my own history of returns may have also helped: I average only one every two years at the minimum. I can probably count less than five returns in the last decade and a half of using Amazon.
Yup. I figure that anything I need to return / repair has at least $40-50 in overhead. The current shipping situation amplifies however good/bad the deal you got was.
i love being an amazon customer; less so an amazon merchant.
we sell DIY products, which can be damaged easily (improper electrical connections, poor RTFM, etc). the no-questions-asked return policy is not great for us.
How would you even go about this though? What store will accept a return “because it consumes too much power when off?” They most likely don’t even have tools available to verify the claim.
Even if you ship it to Sony, when will you see your refund?
returns are not universally free or easy. I bought a power supply for a computer (corsair) and it went on sale a week later. I called to get a price adjustment and amazon told me they don't match even their own prices. So I said I'd return it and order a new one and I was told I'd have to pay return shipping.
But having to return something is an impact on me, and they know that statistically most of I will probably not bother.
There should be some sort of penalty for inflicting the damage after the sale besides merely nulling the sale.
Now I have to find another tv, and until I finish the return and shop and install process, I have either a defective tv or no tv, which screwed up any plans I made involving it.
Meanwhile, I did not get to mess with the money I paid for the tv after I paid it. It went into the manufacturers posession and I never got to touch it again, take some back, change the interest rate it's earning, change what stocks or equipment it was spent on...
Being able to return for refund is great, but it doesn't actually make you whole, and the damage done to your property and your use of your property was deliberate and unnecessary. (not an accident or honest failure or act of god, but a knowing choice to damage property owned by someone else.)
Getting the money back and no more is like getting punched in the face, and all you get for that is you get to make them stop punching you in the face.
And the damage may or may not be a mere trivial annoyance.
This is a contrived example, but ALL examples are contrived and yet countless real examples exist and happen all the time, so the contrived nature is irrelevant:
What if for example the tv were used as part of a recording process monitoring a long-running experiment that was either very expensive to set up, or whose results are important, not just money important but Important, and can't be replicated except by starting over which may require time no one has like years, and the banner ad obscured a critical part of the image and blew the whole process?
You can't just say "you shouldn't construct something so important with consumer parts". It's true but it doesn't get the property damager off the hook, since it's still a fact that the damage didn't happen by itself as a natural proprerty of the fact that a device was sourced from BestBuy, the damage happened because the manufacturer chose to actively cause the damage.
Fire customers? I've never heard of that. My household is a heavy Prime user, and we make returns pretty frequently (few times a month). We've never had any issue.
This is something I had to teach my dad. But he believed it thoroughly until he had a few high purchase items fail outside of warranty. My advice to him has been look for customer reviews and he suspicious of the positive ones and aware of all the negative ones. My other advise is buy from a reputable distributor like Costco who makes returning something incredibly easy.
Does Amazon accept these faulty items back and refund the customers if they ask? Do they pay the return shipping cost? Assuming yes, surely this is costing them a lot as well.
I've worked with a small hardware manufacturer for consumer electronics a few years back and they literally trashed every return (at least in the US market).
They used to just let customers keep them until people apparently caught on and took advantage of the policy.
I know they trashed them as I was the only company resource in the US and they shipped them to my house to be destroyed. :/
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