This reminds me of how a friend (as a teenager in the 90s) would buy expensive video cards from Best Buy and CompUSA only to swap them out with cheap cards off eBay, re-shrink wrap the box and return for a hefty profit. I thought it was a clever, profitable hack at 16 years old but now I’m ashamed I didn’t just call this what it was: theft.
Fry's electronics when I was there was a victim of that. Fry's management in their heydays (before newegg, amazon) gave the directive to open boxes, even when these boxes appear new, during the return-process. This is the result of lessons.
Hopefully, Amazon will learn it or make it a problem for the vendors.
At least they were doing something about it. In my younger days working retail at CompUSA, I once pointed out that a customer was attempting to return a cheaper video card in a better video card's box.
I got in trouble (not much trouble, but still) for making the customer unhappy :/.
Oh, the ending wasn't super interesting. I was telling the customer that I wasn't going to process the return, they asked to get a manager - and when I obliged, the manager sided with the customer and chided me a little after they left. That's pretty much the end of it, I don't recall it coming up after that one day.
I recall people doing this but just putting a NIC in there and returning it to Best Buy. The Geek Squad employee would open the box to verify a card was in there, but wouldn’t know what it should look like and would accept a $15 NIC in place of a $200 video card.
Fry's is the only retailer I have been to where an LP associate insisted on opening up a product I just bought new to inspect it. Yep, its a rice cooker, I should have went over to returns to return it as its condition changed from new to open box before I left the store.
Yes, they are like that. However, it is mandatory for the LP to check any thing that an employee has bought. They also check lunch bags, boxes. One time, LP caught an employee who stuffed his lunch bag with lots of DVDs.
Other time, the LP manager and the customer service manager (who manages the front checkouts and cash) got colluded, and switched the direction of the camera near the cash counting area; then $10K cash was gone. Both managers got fired.
Another incident. One LP associate and another guy at the return counter ran a scam together by issuing store credit for things that are NOT returned. For every return there, LP associate has to sign off.
A rice cooker is a cylindrical item that usually comes in a rectangular box that leaves empty room in the corners. The LP associate was checking for additional unpurchased items in the box, not that you were getting a rice cooker.
There may have been some inside theft / collusion going on with employees.
Example: Employee takes a rice cooker off the shelf, puts high value electronics (memory, processors, etc) inside, reseals it with shrink wrap. He tells his friend on the outside to buy the rice cooker to smuggle it out. They then split the proceeds.
This probably goes on for weeks until the store wonders why they're suddenly selling so many rice cookers, but are already running low on Pentium Pros and 32 meg SIMMs.
too bad fry's is done for. despite the problems, i miss them now.
towards the end, ie the last few years, when i brought an expensive-ish item to the counter, or more often when they brought it out of the cage for me to complete the purchase, i'd open the item at the counter in front of the cashier. 100% of the time the cashier would balk "hey you can't do that" (i hadn't paid yet), which is of course stupid to say. i just needed to verify that the item was new and also not a 52-switcheroo, as we used to call it.
recently (2019-2020) i've bought 2 damaged high end products from best buy. outer box perfect, inner product damaged. luckily BB is like amazon and has complete no-hassle returns.
more longer ago i've received a few duds from ebay and other non-amazon retail merchants. smaller value things i just write off but some of the bigger ones it's been painful getting the rep to take it back. the next time i do such a purchase i am setting up a camera to do an unboxing video.
Yep I just said above I’ve started opening any non cheap purchase in front of a Ring doorbell. Have a scissor in a hidden spot above front door on the outside so I don’t get too lazy and bring the unopened box inside.
I’ve only done it twice so far after getting really bad luck and back to back swapped items in May.
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On the other hand, my friend who sells on eBay frequently said even if I film myself packing up, sealing, and giving the same box to UPS or post office, EBay and PayPal (if they’re still doing eBay stuff) probably won’t care and side with buyer still.
Should have? Just because 'floor model/return' and 'only the box was touched' fall under the same umbrella doesn't mean you should treat them the same.
A discount would be unreasonable, and getting your money back wouldn't improve your situation at all. Unless that was some kind of collector's item rice cooker.
No, you should have said "No thank you, have a great day" and keep on walking. You already bought the item and you have no duty to them for anything further.
(I do this at any store that checks receipts, except for Costco, because I don't want to risk them revoking my membership. Never had a problem.)
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, but I also don't know why anyone would stand in a line to leave a store. Just say no thanks and walk past them, like every other unwanted solicitation.
>Hopefully, Amazon will learn it or make it a problem for the vendors.
The problem is, it'd be trivial for someone with a sticker printer to slam a new label on the drive, saying 16TB. It'd be quite unrealistic to have Amazon own the tools and perform QA testing on all the millions of items on their site. You see a similar problem with knock off headphones, even plugging them in and listening to a song wouldn't be enough to find most fakes.
I think the only real solution is this to be fixed at the government level. At the moment it's too expensive and risky to go after customers, even when Amazon can determine they are running this scam. Either you get drawn into a legal battle trying to prove it, or you get labeled as evil Amazon going after the innocent little guy in the media. It's easiest for Amazon to just raise prices 1% and call it a day. Which is what Walmart does for theft/return fraud as well, and likely every company in the U.S.
There needs to be a law that makes it easy for Amazon (and other companies) to go "this account was found to have returned different merchandise 5 times, they need to pay $xxxx fine" and it to be done. But if even if one of these cases go to trial, it'd be at least a $5000 expense to Amazon.
As long as this is impossible in our legal system, these scammers will continue to thrive.
> It'd be quite unrealistic to have Amazon own the tools and perform QA testing on all the millions of items on their site. You see a similar problem with knock off headphones, even plugging them in and listening to a song wouldn't be enough to find most fakes.
If amazon doesnt have capacity to verify products they are selling, they shouldnt be selling them. They are knowingly contributing to fraud and we write it off as "they're too big to regulate themselves"
Returns are sold in pallets to resellers who accept the risk. But amazon shouldnt be selling returns if they can't or haven't verified the item is correct and functional.
Your solution is for a private company to be able to levy fines against people without having to prove anything in court? That seems worse than the current system.
My solution is somehow a system is put in place where when providing overwhelming evidence, a company can avoid a lawsuit that could easily cost 10s of thousands of dollars, and at the very least, five thousand (if they have to show up at all, that is very much not free).
It's a hard problem to solve, that's why people talk about it so much.
Used to work at Computer City in the mid 90s. It was not always that easy to verify if you had the right product in the box even when opening a returned item, especially if you were not familiar with the product being returned. Looking things up on the internet was not always possible / slow.
Every store did have a shrink wrap machine which were used nightly. Hard to say how many improperly returned products were resold back then, or even how many goods may have been repackaged in the back warehouse on reception before ever hitting the floor.
A very common tactic during the period when video cards were improving rapidly was to buy a card, use it for six months, and then return it and buy the newer one.
Rinse and repeat.
For a while a lot of these electronics retailers had a zero question policy, but when they moved to asking "Why?", people would proudly talk about ruining the card with 120v to justify the return.
There are ways that people can rationalize these gaming of the system behaviors, but it just seems to be a descent to crapitude, where every retailer treats every return as a crime, because often it really is.
> There are ways that people can rationalize these gaming of the system behaviors, but it just seems to be a descent to crapitude, where every retailer treats every return as a crime, because often it really is.
I do wonder where the line is, though.
I didn't have a PS3 growing up, but I wanted to play Uncharted and a few other games when I was in High School. Game rentals were long gone by then, much less console rentals—but I realized that Gamestop had a 7-day return policy on used hardware.
So one year, during spring break, I bought a used PS3 and copies of Uncharted 2 and 3. I didn't manage to finish the latter in time, but I still enjoyed myself.
I am to this day convinced I did nothing wrong. The console was used both before and after purchase, and I took good care of the hardware and followed the written return policy. And in the process, I bought multiple non-returnable games from the store.
But I was definitely taking advantage of the return policy, since I had no intention of holding on to the console.
But that doesn't seem like a great way to make decisions, right? "It's okay to screw over this store because I don't like Other Thing X that they're doing."
I have a friend who regularly buys items on Amazon, uses them for a couple of years and then returns them just before the warranty expires because of "dead pixels" or some other excuse, and gets a full refund.
Meanwhile I got a new Galaxy S9+ (not in USA obv.) which was broken from day 1 and couldn't get it replaced without suing the store and that would take years. I had to get a brand new phone serviced instead (battery, motherboard). And maybe it wasn't water resistant anymore after being opened.
There are some products that are so unreliable that I have zero sympathy for the company that's reaping what they sow with the warranty. I have a personal electric heater that has a two year warranty but refuses to last a winter. Like it just sits in my bedroom living a cushy life as far as heaters go. But I'm on my 3rd replacement and they keep re-upping the warranty and so I'll probably get a new one every year at this point.
I'm not surprised this can be abused - I emailed Amazon a few years ago about a pair of headphones asking if they could do anything as the manufacturer wouldn't honour the warranty (part of the serial number was illegible IIRC), 18 months after purchase (they had a two year warranty). I was expecting them to, at best, send a replacement. They sent me a full refund before I'd even sent the item back, even though the price of the item had dropped in the mean time.
I had the same thing happen with a Canon 50mm lens, I was starting out with photography and thought I was just bad, until I realized two years later that the lens would not focus properly, and never did. After testing it, I told Amazon, and they asked me to send the lens back and sent me a full refund.
In my case, the product was legitimately broken ever since I bought it, but I dislike people abusing the system.
You could write a check to Best Buy (have it delivered via an attorney to protect your identity) and make good on your theft. It's too late for CompUSA--you already put them out of business.
