Yesterday, a woman came up to my register and wanted to make a return. She gave me her receipt and a Ziploc bag of earring backs. The packaging for the earring backs was also in the bag, but it was a mangled mess. We would never have been able to make sure that all the earring backs that were supposed to be in the package were there, let alone repackage them for resale. I explained the situation to her. Her response was to give me a lecture about how the earring backs didn’t fit the earrings that she wanted to use them with, and she was displeased with the product. Again I explained that unless there was something inherently faulty about the product, I couldn’t return it. The fact that she had already tried them in her ears just aggravated the situation; now, it wasn’t simply a matter of packaging, it was a matter of hygiene.

            She was very upset with me, and demanded to speak to a manager. When the manager came over to my register, he agreed with me: there was no way to do the return, because we would be unable to resell the product. This was also unsatisfactory, and the lady wanted to speak to the district manager about it. My manager went round and round with her for a few minutes, and she finally left in a huff without buying the new item she had picked out and, much to my amusement, leaving the bag of earring backs for which she had so desperately wanted a refund.

            She’s not the only one, either. Another woman wanted a refund on a spool of ribbon she had already used because it had cost more than she originally wanted to pay. Another customer wanted to return a frame he had bought last week because there was a better sale on them going on this week. I even had a customer who brought in her receipt to get a price adjustment on an item that she bought last week because there was a coupon out this week.

            I bring this up in part because I find it amusingly ridiculous. The first woman bought a product, opened the product, damaged the packaging, used the product, decided it wasn’t the product she had intended to buy, thrown the product in a sandwich bag, and expected me to fix her mistake. Don’t get me wrong, I know that making returns is a part of my job as a cashier. I’m very good at making returns. I can tell you the return policy backwards and forwards and probably in my sleep.  

            I even respect returns as a means of keeping the retail industry honest to a certain degree. Returns of items help to make companies responsible for their product: if it’s faulty, they don’t make any money on it. They’re also a means of establishing a healthy relationship between a store and its customers: returns are but one way a store can exhibit good faith and provide outstanding customer service. Returns should not, however, be a means of allowing customers to screw the system.

            Returns are not intended for us, as consumers, to be able to buy a product, play around with it, exhaust its usable life, and then bring it back so that it’s like we haven’t spent any money on our entertainment. They are also not a means for us, as consumers, to get the sale prices on items. Believe it or not, it’s a regular occurrence for people to come in and try to return an item and buy it again at the sale price. It’s also very common for customers to come in and want to return an item and purchase it again with a coupon (coupon usage is another of my pet peeves, but that is itself an entire discussion).

            I know a great many people will think, why not? A penny saved is a penny earned, and this is a way to save a few pennies. The problem with that is that it kills the system. I think a certain amount of this behavior comes from not understanding how retail works.

            It costs a certain amount to make a product. Say, it costs one dollar to produce those earring backs that the woman discussed earlier wanted to return. The company who makes them cannot simply sell them for one dollar, because selling something for the cost of production does not cover such things as maintaining the building in which the product was produced. So retailers buy the product from the manufacturer at $1.50. The retailer cannot sell the earring backs for $1.50 for the same reason the manufacturer cannot sell them for $1.00: the cost of running a business. Consumers, I think, often think that the price of an item is all profit. Admittedly, a goodly portion of it is profit. But a bit of it also goes to pay the person who has to deal with crap like this.

            The sale price of an item cuts into the store’s profitability. If everyone got the sale price, or the coupon price, on every item, every day, the store would not make any money. If the store does not make any money, then it cannot pay its employees. Without employees, a store cannot function, and ultimately closes.

            Now that we have all had our potted economics lesson for the day, let’s talk about the human factor. When consumers try to get one over on the system like that, it shows a distinct lack of respect for the employees, such as the part-time cashier (A.K.A., me). Quite literally, if the store does not make its sales goals for the week, I get fewer scheduled hours the next week. In other words, the woman trying to return the earring backs that she had already used and abused was, albeit unwittingly, but also very selfishly, making it more difficult for me and my other hourly coworkers to pay rent for the next month.

            This goes back to the societal thinking skills I discussed last week. That lady wasn’t thinking about me, or my coworkers, or the people in a factory somewhere that operate the machinery to make the earring backs, or the person who (had we been able to repackage them) bought the earring backs after her. I’m going to assume that if she had, she wouldn’t have behaved that way.