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Comment by float4 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of products are returned in used state, or have very slight use marks like scratches, tiny dents, protective foil that's been removed, etc. These items therefore can't be resold as new. Finding out exactly which items are and are not good enough is expensive, and therefore the items are just discarded.

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>About half of the items marked for destruction were still in their shrink-wrap, while the other half were returned items in good condition, they said.

They're destroying new products too!

'In good condition' and appearing to still be in original shrink-wrap isn't good enough to sell as new to a consumer though.

You can try to offload it via a box of junk auction, and they do do that, but I'm not sure how tractable it is at scale.

Counterfeit, recalled, hazardous, unlicensed, etc items can all be "new". And need to be destroyed.

The article is heavy on implication and light on facts.

They are destroying things for a reason, which isn't given. It could be a bad reason of course, but probably isn't.

Amazon Warehouse attempts to get some value out of things that are easy enough or worth it to do a cursory inspection - but if you go to return some small value items Amazon tells you to just keep it/throw it away.

The amount of retail "wastage" that occurs would be surprising to many - one you may have seen is the "book without cover has been reported destroyed" you sometimes see - it's not worth it for publishers to have booksellers ship back unsold inventory.

> but if you go to return some small value items Amazon tells you to just keep it/throw it away.

Anecdotally, this isn't always true. I have only returned a handful of things over the years, but among them was a microphone windscreen that didn't really fit. It cost maybe €6 or so and they did have me send it back.

I don't know what triggers the "keep it" option but I suspect there's a formula involving shipping price, whether it is a shipped/sold by Amazon or a marketplace vendor, account standing, etc.

I think in the past it was more likely they would have you keep an item. It seems to me (also anecdotally) now they don't want to take back just food items.

I think there's a correspondence between the COVID-19 reduction of their real-human chat line and having us return everything except food now.

It's curious to me that used items in amazon Warehouse sell for very high prices...

For example, I randomly picked a 24V power supply:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/dp/B07P4N3H1F/

Cost: GBP 16.99, non-new + GBP 4.99 shipping.

Yet From ebay an equivilent item, inc shipping, is [1] costing GBP 4.43 (brand new). From Aliexpress the item costs GBP 4.87. On Google, there are 10+ companies all offering this device for similar prices.

There is some kind of market failure going on that is allowing Amazon to be substantially higher priced for the same items even when the item is in non-new condition.

[1]: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/191620564194

The price at Amazon Warehouse is entirely based on some Amazon formula relative to the current "new" price at Amazon - which can result in weird price effects such as the one you noted.

It can also result in very good prices when the "new" item drops with a coupon or similar.

That's a 24 V AC power supply with a 8 meter cable, which requires a lot more copper and iron than a little switch-mode DC plugpack with as little cable as they can get away with. They're very different products.

But then why waste resources on shipping back the items if they are going to be destroyed? Is it because if customers find out this is happening there'd be a spike in returns?

>Finding out exactly which items are and are not good enough is expensive, and therefore the items are just discarded.

Correction. It's expensive in comparison to the cost of discarding (including disposal/environmental damage fees).

Which is something we can actually change.

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