> If you return goods to the store often this will be used against you.

What is often? I have a hard time believing retail establishments with razor thin profit margins are rejecting profit unless the customer is likely causing them to lose money.

> Even though I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, just having a few drinks with friends.

What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks.

There’s nothing “wrong” with driving more distance than someone else, but auto insurers have to charge more to someone that drives more, since that increases their risk of loss.

> What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks.

The whole idea behind health care is that some people subsidize other people - ie. most people are healthy and use less health care services than they pay for, while a few people get sick and require health care services that they would never have been able to afford.

I'm fine with subsidizing other people, the alternative is to be okay with people that have problems to be thrown out of the system and not receive the care they need.

In any case, it's not okay for insurers to have fine grained access to what people buy, eat, drink, do. I struggle playing it out in my mind in a way that doesn't end horribly.

> Certainly, no one would argue against the right of a small business owner to refuse to do business with a customer that is causing them a loss.

When the profit from occasionally serving one person in a wheelchair is less than the cost of providing the wheelchair access, yet we still demand it, indeed that's why we have to demand it - if you still made money from the person in a wheelchair, you'd put the ramp in anyway.

Yes, I guess there is an exception for people with disabilities, but in the context of this discussion, I mean someone who returning items excessively. Clearly a return policy is infeasible if every person returned every item from every person. There must be an assumption that a return policy won't be abused to keep the return policy feasible for everyone.

In the past decade I’ve anecdotally noted that some places with famously liberal return policies have tightened up. Outdoor equipment retailer REI is my favorite example.

They have switched from unlimited returns forever for any reason to 1 year.

My theory is it’s a combo of two things. 1. People abusing return policies. 2. More and more items that used to be durable becoming consumable. In a lot of industries the drive for lightweight and high tech has led to things that simply can’t last. I have a backpack that weighs less than a pair of jeans, but it certainly won’t last the way my dads old backpack lasted. Same thing with my battery powered drill, I really doubt that I’ll be able to find a battery for it in 30 years.

The backpack and the battery powered drill are two things that have shifted from buy it for life, to consumable good.

> unless the customer is likely causing them to lose money

The problem is that this fact is (or will be) determined by some obscure black box algorithm that might even take into account other unrelated data from social media or data brokers.

Your activity elsewhere shouldn't affect your ability to return an item, regardless of whether it's profitable for the store or not (of course if it was up to the store they would rather not deal with the bad, terrible monsters that dare to... return items).

> The problem is that this fact is (or will be) determined by some obscure black box algorithm that might even take into account other unrelated data from social media or data brokers.

I think this data should be public. Much like a credit report is in the US and can be checked for accuracy.

>of course if it was up to the store they would rather not deal with the bad, terrible monsters that dare to... return items).

I know from experience there are people that abuse return policies (basically stealing by using the item and then returning it), and unless the store increases prices to make everyone else subsidize the people that abuse it, I don’t know what the other option is.

> basically stealing by using the item and then returning it

If the item is in a condition where it can be resold at full price (aka you can't even tell whether it's been used), does it matter? If anything, it reduces waste.

If it's not in a resellable condition, then the store should discount the refund by a reasonable amount to make up for it. We don't need yet more scummy entities like credit bureaus which you can't opt out of.

I'm also not confident that improving the retailers' margins is going to trickle down to lower prices for consumers as opposed to go into some executive's pocket or get pissed away in marketing/advertising spend.

> If the item is in a condition where it can be resold at full price (aka you can't even tell whether it's been used), does it matter? If anything, it reduces waste. If it's not in a resellable condition, then the store should discount the refund by a reasonable amount to make up for it.

How is all of this supposed to be determined at a return counter in the 2 min interaction between a retail employee and customer?

As a customer, I would only like to buy an item that came from the factory. Especially anything electronic, there’s almost no way for me to discern if someone has damaged it otherwise. I also don’t see how manufacturers could be held liable for warranties if they aren’t sure one the chain of custody.

> I'm also not confident that improving the retailers' margins is going to trickle down to lower prices for consumers as opposed to go into some executive's pocket or get pissed away in marketing/advertising spend.

If retail businesses had pricing power, they would be asking for more than razor thin profit margins. Retail executives aren’t currently turning away dollars from their pocket, they don’t have access to them in the first place since competing retailers will take their business if they try to.

> How is all of this supposed to be determined at a return counter in the 2 min interaction between a retail employee and customer?

That's not a valid reason for introducing yet another data collection scheme that's likely to have hidden biases and false positives, not to mention the potential of this data being leaked or exploited for other nefarious purposes (do you really trust a retailer not to secretly use this data for other purposes like marketing).

> As a customer, I would not like to buy an item that did not come from the factory. Especially anything electronic, there’s almost no way for me to discern if someone has damaged it otherwise. I also don’t see how manufacturers could be held liable for warranties if they aren’t sure one the chain of custody.

Is this currently a major problem at big box stores (excluding Amazon because they intentionally ignore the issue)? I personally can't remember a single occurrence of me buying goods in a supermarket that ended up being used/damaged in a way I could tell.

> If retail businesses had pricing power, they would be asking for more than razor thin profit margins. Retail executives aren’t currently turning away dollars from their pocket, they don’t have access to them in the first place since competing retailers will take their business if they try to.

And yet money is still being pissed away in marketing, which means they do have money to spare. Why do you think the savings would trickle down to the consumers instead of just being "invested" into either marketing or something else?

Starting a supermarket isn't an easy task; the barrier of entry and the upfront costs (for the retail location alone) is insane, so I find it hard that competition would prevent this. Possibly over several decades it could translate to your goods being a few dozen cents cheaper, but I'd rather not live in a world where you need to "Login with Facebook" to be able to return an item.

>That's not a valid reason for introducing yet another data collection scheme that's likely to have hidden biases and false positives, not to mention the potential of this data being leaked or exploited for other nefarious purposes (do you really trust a retailer not to secretly use this data for other purposes like marketing).

I didn't claim it was. There are various reasons for the data collection. One is obviously marketing, but another may also be identifying bad actors.

Also, almost all stores have rewards programs of sorts that amount to a few percentage points of discount in exchange for tracking your purchases. People will, by and large, willingly give their identifying information in exchange for this, so I think it's inevitable (unless this type of discount was outlawed).

>Is this currently a major problem at big box stores (excluding Amazon because they intentionally ignore the issue)? I personally can't remember a single occurrence of me buying goods in a supermarket that ended up being used/damaged in a way I could tell.

I don't know, I just know I would rather have something new. I assume electronics or stuff that can be invisibly damaged gets sent back to the manufacturer or sold as refurbished after it is returned.

>And yet money is still being pissed away in marketing, which means they do have money to spare. Why do you think the savings would trickle down to the consumers instead of just being "invested" into either marketing or something else?

How are you determining that money is being pissed away? Are you suggesting all these retail business owners and operators are wasting money that they could be pocketing?

>Starting a supermarket isn't an easy task; the barrier of entry and the upfront costs (for the retail location alone) is insane, so I find it hard that competition would prevent this.

It's very easy to start a retail business. That's why the profit margins are so low, it's all very textbook microeconomics. In fact, with the internet, the retail location matters even less, so the barriers to entry got even lower and now Chinese manufacturers can directly sell to buyers. It's exactly in this situation that marketing and brand awareness (presumably to advertise quality control) is valuable.

> There are various reasons for the data collection. One is obviously marketing, but another may also be identifying bad actors.

And my point is that since companies can't be trusted to not use this data for marketing purposes (and the legal/regulatory environment is ineffective at deterring that) then they should not have that data.

> almost all stores have rewards programs [...]. People will, by and large, willingly give their identifying information in exchange for this, so I think it's inevitable

I don't have a problem with it being optional and voluntary (though I still think more regulation and transparency around what is done with that data is badly needed), but the problem begins when you need a loyalty card or providing identifying data to return an item for example, since as per the previous point they can't be trusted with not misusing this data. I don't want to live in a world where you have to "Login with Facebook" to purchase or return something.

> I just know I would rather have something new

I agree, but I mean whether it's worth proposing and normalizing a large-scale data collection scheme and all the problems this entails (especially around bias - what if your algorithm start declining returns from black people because blacks were under-represented in the data and a single individual making a bad return was enough to sway the balance) to weed out maybe 1% of bad returns?

> How are you determining that money is being pissed away?

Because paying companies to waste people's time and annoy them with ads does not improve the quality of the products that I am buying, and yet part of the price I pay for most goods goes to this useless and counter-productive endeavour.

> It's very easy to start a retail business.

I am talking about starting a business that can compete with the big-box stores, since your original argument was that screening returns would translate to savings and that would give the businesses who do pass on those savings to the customer a competitive advantage, but the average 2-4% saving (or less) isn't enough for a brand new competitor to emerge, thus the established retailers don't actually have pressure to pass on those savings onto the customer instead of making them disappear into a black hole.

I have no idea of the precise savings that screening returns would result in, but I know the following from years of reading financial reports of large retailers:

1) The profit margins are tiny, literally in the sub 5% range.

2) This means the operations of the businesses that do exist have been extremely streamlined, and there's not too much juice left to squeeze

3) If they're doing something, it means it is a necessity to stay in business, and a business wasting money in the single digit percent profit margins will not be in business for long.

4) If a competitor starts screening returns, and sees their profitability rise as a result, then they can price their products more competitively and win business. Retail businesses are competing for volume, and customers only care about price.

You can see from the public reports that no one is getting rich off of these companies. They're probably just doing what they have to do to survive, including the marketing and the screening of returns.

> What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks.

Many countries levy special taxes on alcohol. If at least a portion of that money is used towards healthcare, the subsidy by teetotallers either grows smaller or disappears entirely.

But, of course, that requires correct use of said tax money.

My point was that I could be flagged as a gambler even though I've never used pokies, I wasn't talking about alcohol consumption.

In other words I'm worried about a rating being decided by an obscure algorithm that no one can vet.

I'd rather not pay for someone else social care than have my card transactions tracked so that someone can build a statistical model on my likelihood to need medical care.