In a race to acquire new customers and retain them at any cost, retailers have taught shoppers to behave in ways that are bad for virtually all involved. Retailers of all kinds have always had to deal with returns, but processing this much miscellaneous, maybe-used, maybe-useless stuff is an invention of the past 15 years of American consumerism. That’s because it is harmful and inefficient. It sounds harmful and inefficient-all the box trucks and tractor trailers and cargo planes and container ships set in motion to deal with changed minds or misleading product descriptions, to say nothing of the physical waste of the products themselves, and the waste created to manufacture things that will never be used. We can dispense now with a common myth of modern shopping: The stuff you return probably isn’t restocked and sent back out to another hopeful owner. Some of it will be diverted into a global shadow industry of bulk resellers, some of it will be stripped for valuable parts, and some of it will go directly into an incinerator or a landfill. retailers took back more than $100 billion in merchandise sold online.Īll of that unwanted stuff piles up.
#Fashion nova return free#
At the very least, many retailers now offer free shipping, free returns, and frequent discount codes, all of which promote more buying-and more returns. Some retailers actively encourage the practice in order to help customers feel confident in their purchases. For clothing, it can be even higher, thanks in part to bracketing-the common practice of ordering a size up and a size down from the size you think you need. The average brick-and-mortar store has a return rate in the single digits, but online, the average rate is somewhere between 15 and 30 percent. When people can’t touch things before buying them-and when they don’t have to stand in front of another human and insist that a pair of high heels they clearly wore actually never left their living room-they send a lot of stuff back. This explosive growth in online sales has also magnified one of e-commerce’s biggest problems: returns.
More shopping of almost every type shifts online each year, a trend only accelerated by months of pandemic restrictions and shortages. Estimates vary, but in the past year, one-third to one-half of all clothing bought in the United States came from the internet. But as online shopping became ever more frictionless-and the conditions in the fitting room ever less desirable-Americans realized that it might just be better to order a few sizes on a retailer’s website and sort it out at home. Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, even as stores became dingy and understaffed, the dressing room try-on remained a crucial step in the act of clothing yourself. Maybe you have heard your own panicked voice croak, “Someone’s in here!”
At one point in your life or another, as you wriggled your clammy body into a new bathing suit-underpants still on, for sanitary purposes-you have probably experienced the split-second terror of some space cadet trying to yank the door open (if you’re lucky enough to have a door). Over the course of several decades and just as many rounds of corporate budget cuts, dressing rooms have filled with wonky mirrors and fluorescent lights and piles of discarded clothes. Now, unless you’re rich enough to sip gratis champagne in the apartment-size private shopping suites of European luxury brands, the dressing room you know bears little resemblance to its luxe progenitors. The concept began its mass-market life as an amenity in Gilded Age department stores, a commercial sanctuary of pedestals and upholstered furniture on which to swoon over the splendid future of your wardrobe.
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