Comment by RandallBrown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RandallBrown | Hacker News Reader

A little surprised there's no mention of Nordstrom since their return policy is famously generous.

I worked for Nordstrom for a few years and one stat about returns that I heard was absolutely wild. Apparently something like 80% of all dresses sold got returned.

A lot of this was because people would buy an expensive dress for a single event and only want to wear it once, but people would also order a few sizes and just return the ones that didn't fit.

We worked on a few different things to make the latter process a little better for the consumer and cheaper for the business. A fun solution was allowing you to set up a reservation for a dressing room at a local store. You would choose a bunch of items and then "reserve" them to try on. Once you made the reservation someone in the store would go pick the items in various sizes and get them ready for you. When you arrived at the store, a dressing room with your name was ready and (if I remember correctly) you could just walk out with the items you wanted and leave the rest.

I'm not sure this experience ever made it outside of a few stores in the Seattle area.

I know what happens to LL Bean returns (no longer lifetime sadly due to abuse) .. they go to the Bean Outlet in Freeport. We have a lot of randomly-monogrammed tote bags and towels in our house purchased from there, haha.

My wife and I have definitely used Nordstrom’s return policy by buying two sizes and returning the one that fit worst. But Nordstrom still benefits because we would return the online orders at the store in person, and if we are there we are going to do some shopping.

Yeah, buying multiple sizes and returning the bad fits was never something anyone really wanted discourage. Most of the ideas were around making people confident they could get a better fit without ordering multiple items or making the in store return experience better so people would use it.

I live in ex-USSR Central Asia and there is no such a thing as return, but many stores allow you to take an item and echange for different size if does not fit.

Some stores (generally high end clothing) offer 'Personal Shopper' service that does what you described, its not just Nordstrom. There are also small businesses, and people who will do 'Personal Shopper' services across brands / stores.

What I described is a bit different than a personal shopper program, which Nordstrom also has.

This experience involved basically no interaction with a store employee. The Nordstrom app would alert the store that the customer was approaching and their dressing room would be readied. After that the customer only interacted with salespeople if they wanted to.

Nordstrom also had a pretty cool personal shopping system that I'm not sure still exists. Apparently stylists and customers can have fairly close relationships and it was pretty common to exchange numbers so a stylist could alert the customer of new items they might like. You could link your Nordstrom account to your phone number and stylists could send you items and you could simply reply with a yes or no to buy them.

This was done using a custom texting app on the stylist's end. This gave Nordstrom some more visibility into their customer's shopping habits and prevented the stylist from having to give out their personal phone number.

> stylists and customers can have fairly close relationships and it was pretty common to exchange numbers so a stylist could alert the customer of new items they might like.

I'm sure you're probably well aware of this, but for those younger than 30 who might not have relevant experience, this was standard practice among commissioned sales staff at all department stores until roughly the turn of the millennium (that was roughly the end of the line for most stores even offering commission, so the concept of a professional salesperson quickly died in favor of cashiers who have no stake in the transactions). I had such a job as a teen, at a store which would be considered very middle-class. This was 2001. Being a dork, I read all the handbooks and manuals, and they explained all about prospecting -- how to keep a book of all my customers, to keep track of all their important dates and things. It suggested sending them letters telling them about new items they might like, gift ideas, etc.

Today that store is still operating, but zero employees have any incentive to even provide any form of customer service, let alone build relationships with customers. Nordstrom is thankfully much closer to how things were, but it's sad to me that now you have to be pretty loaded to afford to shop somewhere that offers customer service.

My understanding is an actual personal shopper does a lot more than that - they're the ones even selecting the candidate options.

Buy and return is the only option offered at some places now that the dressing rooms were removed for Covid and never returned.

I think their new return policy is:

Please do return it, k thanks.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/14/1193726286/smash-and-grab-mob...

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