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Comment by el_benhameen | Hacker News Reader

We had a Costco couch that fell apart after a few months. I wanted to Craigslist it, but my wife wanted to return it. I carried it and the biggest load of shame I’ve ever felt in to the customer service counter and apologized profusely to the guy working there. He shrugged and said “man, it happens all the time, no problem. You wouldn’t believe the kind of stuff people return.”

Another Costco employee told me that they go by the 51% rule: if you have 51% of an item, they’ll take it back, even if it’s the bones and packaging from a two-month-old rotisserie chicken that you say you didn’t like.

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My sister in high school worked at a cosmetics counter at the Mall of America for Estee Lauder. They had the same rule which was even more generous. You could use virtually any of their makeup stuff and as long as their was 10% still in the bottle they would take it back and refund full price.

She said they had a few girls and older women who knew this and would return stuff all the time. She asked her manager if they could blacklist them because it was obvious they were abusing the return policy.

The manager's response? "Its above my pay grade. I'll keep returning their stuff until someone at corporate tells me otherwise."

I had a co-worker who moved into an apartment in the area and bought all of his furniture and appliances at Costco. A year or two later, he took a job in another state and instead of moving all of his stuff across the country or hawking it on facebook, he just returned it all to Costco.

It's certainly not what I would have done but he said they took it all back, no questions asked.

I've heard of real estate agents staging entire homes with various goods from Costco (furniture, TVs, etc) and then simply returning it when the open house is over.

I'd heard similar stories of customers buying goods they knew they only needed temporally that they simply returned afterwards and obtained a full refund for. It does surprise me a little that stores don't have mechanisms in place to prevent this being abused, it's hard to see how it couldn't be a significant financial drain for them. FWIW "no questions asked returns" aren't really a thing in Australia from what I've observed. But not having a receipt isn't usually an issue if they can find the payment on their system and it matches your CC# either.

A few weeks ago, a Costco manager made an exception to needing more than half the product for someone requesting a refund for an empty carton of blueberries.

I would have told them to pound sand. It is basically other Costco shoppers paying for fraudulent returns.

Yeah, and Costco has a mechanism for dealing with it because it it a club system. They can simply kick you out or temporarily suspend your membership. I returned open packages, but it was because the product was spoiled or I was not able to get ahold of manufacturers warranty department. Otherwise, it’s an abuse.

I have heard of people returning / exchanging Keurigs at Costco as soon as they use up all the sample pods... again, and again, and again.

To me as European that just feels like a theft ngl.

This sounds like the kind of abuse that led to changes in REI's returns policy. Back when you could return anything no questions asked for a full refund, people would e.g. buy a tent, sleeping bag, and stove, hike the Apallachian Trail, and then just return all the gear. Or buy one of REI's touring bikes, cycle one of the Trans-American routes, and then return the bike, etc.

I heard of people returning hiking boots after they were worn out. The funny thing is that REI would then sell the return at physical sale.

The return period is now one year.

No couch should be falling apart after so little time. You shouldn't feel guilty when it's a legitimate unhappy customer situation.

Your money sure as hell didn't fall apart after a few months of their receiving it. Except maybe if you paid in BTC.

I once bought a triplet set of luggage from costco that came packed inside each other nesting doll style.

Outer bag was pristine. Upon getting it home I opened it up to find the inner two bags had various scuff marks and baggage claim tags still attached.

Fair play, previous Costco customer. But I had expected a more thorough check of the product before the store returned it to the shelf for resale. It wasn't even marked as previously returned or preowned!

Fry's Electronics was the absolute worst about this. They would sometimes mark items on the shelf down if they were obviously returns, but more often than not they'd re-shrink wrap it and sell it as new. And more often than not whatever it was would be missing relevant important pieces so as to be useless. (This on top of the "we're going to search your bag on the way out of the store", which I would just glare my way out of.) I loved the idea of Fry's having what I wanted, but the actual experience was wretched.

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