I hang out a lot in r/upsstore, because I work at one. Franchised, usually independently owned and operated stores that do shipping, printing, faxing, notaries, mailboxes, some even do passport photos and fingerprinting.
But if you've ever worked at one, or even been inside one for any period of time, you'll know that none of that comprises the majority of the job. The vast, overwhelming amount of time inside any UPS Store across America is spent processing Amazon returns.
I mean it. You'd be surprised. However many Amazon returns you think we see in a day, it's higher. Sometimes people ask how many we do, and when I say "400 to 800, depending on the day," they usually think I'm exaggerating for a laugh. I'm not. Not in the slightest.
A majority of these returns are done simply because they're free. I've had people come in and wait in line 10 minutes to return a single charging cord. But I've also had people come in with two large laundry baskets full of clothes they tried on once and have been "saving up" to return 37 items in one go, because apparently Amazon doesn't ban your account for doing that. The system is absurdly exploitable. It's gotten so bad that people often come in with Shein or Temu returns thinking they can just have us scan a code and then walk out the door, because they're so used to that being how Amazon does returns, they can't even conceptualize that that whole thing is an Amazon-exclusive program.
Lately, Amazon have been encouraging customers to do their returns at other locations, like Whole Foods, Kohl's, or more recently, Staples. This is because Kohl's and Staples were foolish enough to agree to do Amazon returns for free, believing the "increased walk-in traffic" would translate into increased sales. It won't. Ask any UPS Store employee. Hell, ask any Staples employee.
One of the many threads in r/upsstore about this was brainstorming ideas on how this system could be improved somehow. Everyone agreed the best, easiest first step would be limiting returns. Make it so a customer can't have more than 5 or so returns open at any time, with a cooldown timer as well of 12-24hrs between returns. A self-proclaimed store owner chimed in with their opposition to this idea:
So the issue with your thing, is you are now punishing people who don't cause trouble for the program. Example, this lady buys 3 to 4 outfits a month, She buys 5 different sizes (try before you buy) as she can go from xs to med/large depending on the brand. So if she has 3 dresses, she is returning 12 items, or 4 dresses 16. If she has shorts/pants with a shirt, then we are looking at 24-32 items. But you know something, she has her shit together. Straight up, Screenshot with what goes with one, 1, 2 ,3 on the bags, and her SS has 1,2,3. So why should she be punished when we have a customers who would take longer to do 1 return than for her to straight up do 30.
I've never read something so... blind? Just, completely glazing over the hugest, most Titanic-destroying-iceberg sized problem in their argument. I had to respond. It's something I felt very strongly about. I figured I'd share it here.
What she's doing is, at its very core, a pointless, wasteful, horribly harmful thing - the amount of waste generated in shipping all of that to her and shipping it back to a landfill, all the material used to make the clothes she tries on once and then gets thrown away (by Amazon), it's unsustainable and destructive at its core. It's the retail equivalent of smoking cigarettes and then littering the butts. Why should littering be made illegal, it'll mean this one smoker I know won't be able to toss their lit cigarette butts out their car window! Well, that person shouldn't be smoking ANYWAYS!
We used to have a solution for not knowing what size clothing to buy - it was called going to a store and trying things on. I've read, in the history books, that these mythical "clothing stores" even had entire ROOMS dedicated to trying on different items to see what fit you, and anything you didn't decide to keep didn't get immediately shipped halfway across the state and then dumped in a landfill!
I'm just sayin'
Obviously this doesn't apply to disabled people or anyone who for any genuine reason can't go out to stores. But to be clear, it's never the disabled, the immunocompromised, or those with genuine reasons who come in to return their garbage to Amazon. It's almost universally the affluent upper middle class who have more money than sense and are too lazy to get up off the couch in their cushy, isolated suburban home. They'll arrive in their Mercedes SUV, unload 30 cheap pieces of crap, scream when you tell them one of their items needs to be packaged, and then huff and storm out when they're done. These people don't deserve this lifestyle.
And this lifestyle isn't a real lifestyle anyways. It's propped up by an absurdly evil billionaire who knows he's losing money to support their addictions and he doesn't really care, because as long as you're locked in, as long as you're addicted to his services, he's in control. And it's not a matter of if, but of when he gets tired of it, or Amazon spontaneously goes out of business, or he gets his head chopped off, or anything happens that this always-unsustainable house of cards comes crashing down. Your life hasn't actually been improved by Amazon, they just really want you to think that, so that you'll keep using Amazon.
Btw it’s much easier to quit Amazon than you might think for retail purchases. Once you don’t have prime the competitive advantage of shopping there totally vanishes. I have bought a grand total of one thing since April 2020 from Amazon; that one time was literally the only time I’ve ever been able to only get something on amazon. As it turns out, too, having to pay shipping costs disincentivizes you from ordering things! Because you don’t want to pay the cost! That extra second of thinking about it is sometimes all you need
I encourage you to let your prime lapse at the bare minimum and just. Pay attention to how your shopping changes. You damn well know you don’t have to use amazon for everything retail. There are so many other stores, which still exist
I like to buy blu-rays from boutique indie move labels quite often. One of those companies is called Grindhouse Releasing. Their blu-rays usually come in fancy cardboard sleeves with cool art and extras stuffed inside. If I buy direct from their website, the items always arrive carefully and delicately packaged, wrapped on all sides by a layer of bubble wrap and slotted perfectly into a box they use because it's the exact right size to fit their blu-rays with a bit of bubble wrap around them. I've never had one arrived with so much as a dent.
Meanwhile, they have listings on Amazon, which, while priced the same or sometimes a few dollars less, are flooded with reviews and pictures showing how Amazon simply tossed the disc bare into a vastly oversized cardboard box, or crammed it into a brown manila paper mailer, and they almost always arrive crushed, torn, cracked, or otherwise obliterated.
This is not because the employee packing it didn't care, or was being malicious. It's because they didn't have the time to give it the care it needed, and Amazon definitely didn't provide them the supplies they needed to do it properly.
I also used to buy some international discs from Amazon, through a company called Rarewaves, because on the surface the individual price of each item was cheaper on Amazon (did you know Amazon actually makes it a stipulation in their seller contracts that the seller cannot have their items listed for less than their Amazon rates on any other platform, even their own? Jesus Christ). One day I decided to see how much it would cost to buy from Rarewaves directly. I discovered that Amazon was charging more for international shipping and tacking on a "currency conversion guarantee" fee for the privilege of... selling you items at the listed price? Anyways, it's cheaper to buy direct from the seller's own platforms in most cases, and they usually offer robust rewards programs and exclusive deals and coupons and such that end up saving you money in the long run.
