Amazon returns

… and I’m still not quite sure how I feel about that.

I packed it in something leak-proof and put a Post-It on it saying “broken glass”. But I didn’t even need a box, as I dropped it off at the Amazon returns counter at my local Whole Foods.

But …

Shipping a broken jar of jam is clearly fundamentally stupid.

And yet …

Shipping a broken jar of jam was the right thing to do.

I will now outline the whole series of events, so that I may justify to myself what I just did. But it boils down to “there’s no way to tell Amazon that I should just toss this in the trash”.

So … you want your money back, you want to play by the rules?

Then you ship them back their broken jar of jam.

Do be do be do

Amazon gives you the option of having a week’s packages all delivered on one given day. Friday, for me. That’s instead of having different orders arriving throughout the week.

Trying to be a good do-bee, I take them up on that option. Particularly at this time of year, when I’m ordering Christmas presents. I do it because I think it’s (ever-so-slightly) more environmentally friendly, but mostly because it cuts down (for Amazon) the total work involved in delivering my packages.

I’d guess that means a greater likelihood of getting a large carton packed with multiple unrelated items. (Compared to having items arriving on different days.) But I’m not sure about that.

At any rate, today’s shipment had a $10 jar of fancy jam, broken, inside a multi-item carton. The carton had a lot of empty space with no filler material. Not a good plan when you’re shipping glass jars. The only thing that prevented that jar from painting the inside of the carton with jam was a single layer of bubble wrap taped around the jar. As it was, I had to sponge smears of jam off the rest of the items in the box.

Despite this, I still think having all your Amazon packages delivered one day a week is the do-bee way. When feasible. But I might reconsider that after this event.

What to do about the broken jar of jam?

So I go on-line, to get Amazon to send a replacement or refund for that $10 jar of fancy Christmas-present jam that got smashed.

Amazon says, sure old buddy, no problem. When are you going to return the first one to us?

And I’m like, return it? God no. That’s just plain stupid. It’s a mess. Its a smashed jam jar, held together by leaking bubble wrap. It needs to go straight into the trash.

On the Amazon on-line form, there’s no check box for that. Or anything like that. No option for “trust me, you don’t want this back”. If I want a replacement or a refund, I need to return it.

I know that, in theory, I can somehow get in touch with somebody at Amazon and they may OK a refund without the stupidity of returning the jar of jam. But I didn’t want to go to that effort of working my way through their customer service process trying to find somebody to do that for me.

(I once had an empty package delivered from Amazon. You think it’s tough returning a broken jar of jam, try returning the contents of an empty package. That’s how I know that if you can find a human, you can at least sometimes get an exception to what’s shown on the return form.)

And as an economist, I can see that’s its an open invitation to criminal abuse if you let people easily claim a refund without returning the items refunded. So I have no problem at all if Amazon wants you to have to jump through hoops to do that, as a matter of course. I just wasn’t up to hoop-jumping today.

What to do? To get my money back, I have to ship a broken, oozing jar of jam as if it were merchandise.

Either that, or cut my way through Amazon customer service.

Shipping it is, then.

Nesco to the rescue

One uses the gizmo pictured above, plus special plastic bags, to produce vacuum-sealed food. Or, in this case, vacuum-sealed garbage. The bags are heat-sealed (i.e., melted shut), and so are leak-proof as long as the seal doesn’t fail.

I duly sealed the broken jar (bubble wrap, oozing jam, and all) inside a seal-a-meal bag, along with two big sticky notes saying “Broken Glass”. This, to prepare it for its journey back to Amazon.

I then drove to my nearby Whole Foods, and handed that over the Amazon return counter there. If you return it that way, you don’t have to pack it in a box. Whole Foods staff handle that in some fashion.

The guy at the counter was, I think, the biggest person I had ever seen working a counter at Whole Foods. Big and tall, like a college linebacker. Neither here nor there, merely unexpected. The Whole Foods clerks in this area tend to be fit 20-somethings. This was like seeing a bear onstage among the ballerinas.

I let the clerk at the return counter know I was returning a broken jar of jam, with my apology for shipping back something that stupid.

He didn’t bat an eye. Took the package, scanned the QR code Amazon had given me (displayed on my phone), and said I was done. As far as Amazon was concerned, it has been returned. They’ll send an email shortly.

The entire return transaction took about ten seconds. He practically had to shoo me away, as I stood there in disbelief. I thanked him profusely, and walked off to pick up a few grocery items while I was at a grocery store.

In any case, when I decided to return it, I was betting that this ridiculous return has relatively modest environmental impact, relative to just tossing it in the trash. The fact that you don’t have to box your item probably means that they fill a bin with returns, at Whole Foods, then everything gets trucked to some Amazon return center.

I probably used no more than one KWH for the in-town round trip to the store, which would equate to about 0.65 lbs C02 emissions here in Virginia. Full trucks, by contrast, are vastly more efficient than empty autos, for moving freight, on order of 100 ton-miles per gallon of fuel. Pro-rated to my 12 ounce jam jar, the fuel cost from Whole Foods back to Amazon was nugatory. So I’m hope-guessing that the entire return trip “to Amazon” resulted in release of less than a pound of C02. If I’d decided to toss that $10 item in the trash and take the loss, for environmental reasons, that would have worked out to a ludicrous $20,000 per ton C02 avoided.

That in no way suggests that it’s smart to return a broken jar of jam to Amazon. It remains fundamentally stupid. It’s just that if I’m going to burn up $10 to save the environment, there are for more effective ways to burn it.

This takes no account of the effort and energy expended after this broken jar of jam gets back to Amazon. I have no firm idea of what happens after I hand my return over the counter at Whole Foods. Presumably, between my reason for return, the big yellow stickies inside the package saying “Broken Glass”, and the purple goop encapsulated in the vacuum-seal bag, oozing around the bubble wrap, somebody along the line will have the good sense to throw this away. It’s just a question of how much effort it takes to do that.

The upshot is that, no matter how stupid it seems, returning the smashed jar of jam to Amazon was not a particularly bad thing to do. (Assuming my sanitary packing holds up.) It turned out to be almost no hassle, given that I owned a vacuum sealer (though a zip-lock might have been acceptable too, for all I know.) Tossing it in the trash, solely to avoid C02 emissions, would have been ludicrously inefficient.

Plus, damnit, they owed me a new one.

Will I ever see this jam again?

It got me to wondering. In Amazon comments, you will frequently (enough) read of somebody who claims to have gotten an obviously used item sent to them as a new item. The presumption is that the vendor got a return, and sent them a returned item instead of a brand-new item.

I now wonder about the extent to which this is an urban legend. Or not. I see it enough, from a wide enough variety of people, that I’m thinking it’s true, and not an urban legend.

And sure enough, here’s what a CNBC article says about those returns. Amazon will return the merchandise to the seller, at the seller’s option.

When an item can’t be sold as new, Amazon gives the seller up to four options for what to do with returns: each with a fee: Return to Seller, Disposal, Liquidation, or (by invitation only for now) Fulfillment by Amazon Grade and Resell.

Presumably, the original vendor can tell Amazon (for a fee) just to dump this particular return. And this whole sad episode will come to a close.