Returns
Last year consumers in the United States returned $743 billion worth of merchandise, which was 14.5 percent of all the things they bought. That's up, an increase from 10.6 percent in 2020 according to the National Retail Federation. Given that there are costs to a business of returning an unwanted good — including shipping, sorting, warehousing, and then all the work of selling off the returned product to a discount wholesaler or the trash — based on the type of good that people are trying to return, some retailers are occasionally just refunding them and instructing the customer to dispose of the item as they see fit. Calibrating when to give a refund, when to insist on a return, and when a customer might be abusing the system is now a new area of consternation and financial modeling for retailers.
