No agenda. I've been a Amazon customer for almost 30 years and not trying to run a smear campaign. I buy from them every week. I'm just explaining why I've revised my thinking about the "shopping hack" of buying 3-and-return-2 that I used to think was harmless and supposedly a "win/win" for both me and Amazon. My intuition thought Amazon would always restock and resell the other 2 was wrong. Maybe they will but there's a good chance they won't and I'm not interested in being the cause of more environmental pollution. So I try to be more conscientious and avoid frivolously returning things.

Several reasons combine to cause the "illogical" disposal of undamaged returned goods:

- delayed vendor payments (NET90) and how Amazon can deduct the cost of customer returns. That the hidden "perverse incentive" that reduces Amazon's "skin in the game" and motivation to resell it. They're no longer financially on the hook to pay wholesale costs for those returns.

- vendor calculates it's not worth the cost of re-inspecting and re-stocking the merchandise. If the NEW item is now OPEN BOX and must be priced much lower, it negatively affects the ROI calculation even further.

- vendor decides that the extra risk of customers tainting the returned items and causing the next customer to leave a 1 start review (which lowers future sales) is not worth it

The above factors are especially relevant to clothes. I'm ok buying and then returning a Bosch power drill for $200 because I'm confident that the reverse logistics will go through a liquidator instead of the landfill. However, I don't have the same confidence for a $50 shirt. It's the ~$5 vendor's cost not the $25 wholesale cost that must be used as basis for calculating ROI of risk-vs-resale and we have to be realistic that will often favor the landfill.