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.
I used to work at Kohls. Might work there again eventually. But they always need help at Amazon returns. I worked there often.
It really drains you, working that job. Sometimes only one item per customer, sometimes 20. And each customer gets $5 of store credit that's valid for the next 7 days. On a busy day, I'd easily give out more money to customers in an hour than I'd make in the entire day. It's absurd.
And then there are the people who are so grateful for you and all the other workers doing this for them. The ability to buy online and return for free is the best thing since 24 hour open stores.
And there's so much fucking waste. Every single customer needs packing labels and receipts printed. The amount of paper that ends up in the bins from all those labels... It's not something I'm looking forward to, should I have to return to working there.
(Tangentially related but if anybody knows how I could get some good devtool, web, or game development work without a degree, lmk.)
It's honestly absurd, and emphasizes just how fucked up our economy and culture are that this is considered a good thing. I hate it.
And then there are the people who are so grateful for you and all the other workers doing this for them. The ability to buy online and return for free is the best thing since 24 hour open stores.
This something I didn't touch on because I feel like it's kind of hard to relate to unless you've worked this job or one very similar. Somehow even when the customers are appreciative about your work, it still gets on your nerves. Again it comes back to the unsustainability of it all. To bring up the smoking metaphor again, it's like being forced by evil megacorporations to give out free cigarettes to every customer who walks up to you. If someone reacts with "oh, this is just wonderful, thank you so much! I love [megacorporation] for making it so cheap and easy to get cigarettes!" it's not going to make you feel better about your job. If anything it's going to make you feel worse.
And there's so much fucking waste. Every single customer needs packing labels and receipts printed. The amount of paper that ends up in the bins from all those labels... It's not something I'm looking forward to, should I have to return to working there.
Oh, you wanna talk about waste? TUPSS corporate has been getting on everyone's ass lately (presumably because Amazon has been getting on their ass lately) about us doing all our returns to-the-letter properly.
This means that each, individual return gets its own clear plastic bag :)
Customer comes in with 20 cheap dresses destined for the landfill anyways, and each one has its own qr code? That's gonna be 20 clear plastic bags sealed with a paper label, to then be tossed in a cardboard box, shipped several hundred miles, opened back up, ripped back out of those plastic bags to be palletized and sold for pennies or dumped in the garbage. What's the point of the plastic bags? Seemingly just to create more waste. Amazon has quite literally gotten stores shut down for daring to, say, apply the paper label to the plastic bag an item was already in, because that's the "retail packaging" and Amazon says it hurts the resale value to have an old shipping label on it, even though it's not going to be resold. No, you have to put that plastic bag inside another plastic bag, see, to be a good employee. Oh, and god forbid you put two items in one plastic bag and stick both labels on that single plastic bag! You'll get fired for that. They've called out that specific behavior as well. No, you must generate as much plastic waste as mathematically possible, because fuck you.
