Stores to Customers: Keep Your Returns!

The economic cocktail of two parts high fuel prices and a heavy pour of supply chain issues is leaving retailers across the country tipsy. 🍸 And no one's having a good time. 😵💫

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In fact, many stores are considering letting customers keep their returns. Processing and storing the unwanted merch is getting too expensive. All of a sudden, we're extremely dissatisfied with our brand new big screen. 🤥

Here’s Five Fast Facts on what's going on with returns:

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1. 📦 Just Too Much - Big name stores like Target, Walmart, and the Gap say they have way too much inventory, and it costs way too much to keep storing it. 
2. 🚢 Holy Ship - Many retailers ship their unwanted items overseas and resell them to try to make up some profit. However, the rising cost of logistics is causing major headaches, making this process very expensive. 
3. 💰 Prime Returns -  Amazon already has a "just keep it" policy in place for certain items and they've been doing it for several years. 
4. 👟 Here, Keep It - Letting people keep returns like towels and footwear makes sense due to sanitary concerns. Lower-priced, bulky items like strollers, home decor items, and furniture are the most expensive items for retailers to handle.
5. 🥸 Scammers Listen Up - If retailers decide to put this kind of policy in place, they'll also need to make sure people aren't abusing it. The efforts to track this sort of thing would also be expensive, leaving retailers scratching their heads even more.

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🔥Bottom line: The economy continues to change and the downstream effects of inflation and supply chain issues are a real pain for America's retailers. It seems like letting customers keep their unwanted items could result in savings. It also seems like it would then become way too easy for people to take advantage of the policy. We'll wait and see if our fave stores roll this out so we can immediately become discontented with all the best purchases.

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Thoughts on keeping merchandise vs. returning it? Let us know by connecting with us on Social Media and be sure to share this newsletter with any friends & coworkers!

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