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Interesting development.
Just do a search for “retailers say skip returns of unwanted items” and a non-paywalled version of the article should show up.
TL;DR: The biggest retailers are starting to use AI to determine if they let a customer who wants to return an item keep it and get a refund.
Happy New Year to all who happen to see this. My resolution is to come here a little more often this year. 😉
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Well that makes a change! All I find in skips these days is builder’s rubble. 🙂
It’s interesting to see where AI is going. There’s a site called “AI Weirdness” which uses huge databases to produce new song lyrics, biographies of game characters etc.
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Antique frog:Under a different system AI would be fascinating. Under capitalism, I fear what they will do with it – because of what they’re already doing with it.
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@dylan Yes, back in Henry VIII’s time they had the problem of the church being immortal and thus accumulating huge wealth and ownership of one-third of the land. Now we’ve got BlackRock and similar ‘multinational investment management corporations’ who are no doubt the premier utilisers of AI in the employment of capital.
I think the main strength of AI is in its modelling of multi-variable processes. There is a school of sociology, processual or figurational sociology, which emphasises the importance of social process, as against other schools like structurational or figurational. They’re mostly based in the Netherlands- they might have some interesting stuff to say on the subject.
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It’s such a bad practice for these big retailers to let people keep items. It trains folks to know they can possibly complain and just keep the item + money. Shows how much the retailers value the items they sell: most of it is likely just cheap trash.
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Here is a link to one of the articles.
Retailers give customers refunds and tell them to keep items
I guess they are relying on AI to prevent abuse by customers.
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Jay,
Years ago, when Amazon was still largely media, a friend bought a DVD for her mother on Amazon—it was to be a birthday gift. She went to the party, but it turned out Mom had already obtained the DVD and didn’t need two. And she didn’t want it. So she contacted Amazon about a return. Amazon said, “No, just keep it” and refunded her money. Why? Well, it was an inexpensive item and not worth the processing cost for a return. BUT…my friend had been lukewarm about Amazon before that. That day, Amazon got a customer for life, who has bought tons of stuff from them. To her, it wasn’t that Amazon didn’t want the processing cost, to her, it was proof that Amazon cared about her as a customer.
So, rest assured, these big companies have done the math, and they have faith (misplaced or not) that their AI can handle the scammers.
As an ebay seller, ebay already gives me the option of setting up my return policy so that items under a certain dollar amount (or whatever) can be kept by the buyer and a refund issued. Buyers aren’t told ahead of time that their item qualifies for that, but I’m sure some ebay sellers do use this.
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There have been two times in the recent past where we’ve bought something from Amazon, and they told us to keep it. Both times, I’ve sold the item. One was a damaged lazy susan, which was still usable. And the other (which was only a month or two ago) was a furnace filter pack where they sent us the wrong one. We ended up repurchasing it from a totally different site.
Both were Amazon sellers, and not Amazon itself.
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