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. There are two kinds of returned good – an honest one and a dishonest one. The honest one involves buying, for example, a jumper in three different sizes, trying it on and keeping the one that fits while the rest are sent back. In fact, some internet shops (such as American brand Zappos), openly declare: this is how you should be buying and thanks to this you will find the right fit. However, there is also another, dishonest way that involves a customer ordering, say, an elegant suit, attending a wedding or a prom, and sending it back to the shop later while demanding all their money back. This phenomenon (known as ‘wardrobing’) costs the American market as much as USD 8 bln per year (in terms of the value of the returned goods). In this way people ‘borrow’ clothes, 40-inch TV sets during major sports tournaments, or musical equipment for one-off lavish parties. However, the practice has not particularly been the subject of condemnation. When American film director Brian Herzlinger made a film with a video camera he had ‘borrowed’ in this way, not only was he praised as one of the main pioneers of the guerrilla filmmaking trend (making films at the lowest cost possible), but his film (‘My Date with Drew’) received a number of awards at film festivals.
A debate on whether wardrobing is theft or just exploiting a certain imperfection in the system has been raging on the internet for some time. Theft or not, nobody has so far been brought to book for it as there appear to be no penalties for this kind of behaviour. US department store chain Bloomingdale’s, however, has decided to take defensive measures and attach a special label in a highly visible position to each expensive item of clothing sent to a customer. If you remove the label, the store will not accept the item back; if you leave it on, people will know that the suit you are wearing is not yours but ‘borrowed’. However, the majority of retailers prefer not to antagonise customers in this way – and also don’t want to make their own lives more difficult. And the regulations are very much in the online buyers’ favour. For example, in Poland you can return goods within ten days without providing a reason (and some shops even make the period longer in their fight for customers). This still provides ample time to try a suit on, go to a party and return it at your leisure. In the US, some chains have drawn up lists of customers notorious for returning goods and lay down the law to some of them: “This is the last time we accept returned goods. The next time we will not accept them from you.” In any event, before you are put on the black list you are still able to ‘borrow’ a few items for special occasions. Yet it is the shop that has to bear the cost: they pay for the dispatch of the goods, they employ people to check for any lipstick marks on the collar or soup stains on the trousers. This should be regarded as daylight robbery, right? By the way: what are you wearing to your New Year’s Eve party? I don’t want to be the devil in this company, but I think I could actually wear Prada this year.