I’ve just come across two instances of friends and colleagues getting bitten by bad products … and the companies involved putting the bad product straight back on the shelves. First from my friend Jim Davies:

http://jimdaviesrants.blogspot.com/2012/05/reselling-bad-product-after-returns.html

Unfortunately, the game did not work. I cleaned it and tried several times, to no avail. I planned to bring it back. And even though I had no reason to suspect Chumleighs of any foul play, just to make sure I never bought that particular disc again I put a tiny dot of ink on the case insert in a place I would remember later. They gave me my money back. Just today I was browsing, and there was the Hulk game. With the same dot. I told the clerk that I’d returned this game and was disappointed that it was back on the shelf. She said that it might be a different copy, and I told her about the dot. She took the game to the back, and discussed something with somebody, and then put it back on the shelf, right in front of me.

And from fellow transhumanist Elf Sternberg:

http://elfs.livejournal.com/1504793.html

We tried playing it in the Playstation 2, then the Lasonic (which will try and play a frozen pizza, that thing’s amazing, pity about the heat buildup issue…), and finally out laptops. Not even Handbrake could make it past 1:10. I called RedBox, and they were very kind about giving me two coupons (no refunds, sigh): one for this film, and one for any other film I wanted. Then she said, “Make sure, if you try and take another copy out, that you take it out before you put this one back, or it will just give you the one you have already tried.” I expressed surprise. “Doesn’t it know the disc is unuseable?” “When we send someone to service the box, if it is present we will take it out. But while it is in the box, it is considered in circulation.”

Ouch. Needless to say, neither of them were happy.

I, in contrast, have had good experiences with returns. The image pictured is a cracked Kindle DX I got from Amazon that they replaced almost instantaneously. I buy a lot of electronics gear from Fry’s, which has a generous return policy and often (seems) to put stuff back on the shelves because people can’t distinguish between “this is incompatible with my setup” and “this is broken”. And I buy a lot of used and discount books, including one recently from Kepler’s, where I found a book I bought for a dollar turned out to have a missing section due to the printer error.

I didn’t complain – I needed the book to help my wife out with a problem and the section I needed was mostly intact – and felt like, “hey, I got this for a dollar”. I felt like, hey, this is simply expected. But should I have felt that way? Shouldn’t the book have been marked? And shouldn’t Jim and Elf have the expectation that the games and movies they buy or rent are in good condition? Even if many people bring things back as bad when they aren’t, shouldn’t there be an expectation that if someone reports they’ve tried a game or movie in a dozen machines that yes, it’s probably bad? Can’t stores have a machine to test their product?

I don’t buy the argument that “it would cost more money”. I buy the argument that the people who’re running the businesses or even the local stores don’t want to be bothered. That they’d rather follow procedure than be flexible enough to handle anything more than the default case. I’ve seen a lot of this attitude recently. I don’t think it’s new, but I personally have seen more and more of it, where people in charge of systems only want to satisfy the lowest common denominator. Often that means they’re doing things efficiently and cheap – but if the cost of efficient and cheap is selling crap products, I think the cost is too high.

Or is that even fair? Stores know they’re going to get returns. They plan on it. They even gave Jim and Elf their money back (Elf, with some extra). So you can expect to get crap from time to time. I guess what’s bad here is that the system has all the information it needs to do better … and simply doesn’t. It would have been easy for the woman at the game store to toss the item into the garbage or the “for sale – damaged” shelf. It would have been easy for RedBox to mark a video with a damaged bit. That’s what rankles here … when we know what we need to know to do better … and don’t.

Sigh.

-the Centaur