You buy it, you wear it, you return it… and business thrives

Last year consumers on the world’s most developed market, the USA, returned goods worth USD 264 bln to their point of purchase. The world is simply going mad! The president of one of the largest European warehouse developers says that he is optimistic about his sector because consumers, instead of buying the goods they receive, are increasingly sending them back to the stores unpaid for. The customer admittedly does not contribute to the revenue of the store, but the fact that they buy and later return the goods is generating a lot of traffic. “We have to build warehouses in order to make this possible,” the company president explained to me. I found this surprising, so I asked whether the trend was significant. “Of course it’s significant! Let’s just consider my wife. If she bought everything she orders on the internet, I would have been reduced to begging a long time ago!”And what are retailers saying about the returned goods? This depends. T