So I bought a Macbook Air with M1 that I used for 3 months and noticed the right speaker cracking issue (apparently this is widespread on forums) and instead of going through the headache of repair service I ended up just tossing it online and buy a new one for <7500Rs in losses which I thought was a good deal. The new one has the same problem (yes I tried everything from restore to different audio but its not subtle and this time its left one wow!) so I contacted Apple to setup a return immediately. But nope! They are offering a replacement to me but the customer support is throwing policies in my face. Its insane that apple offers no refund for its own products.
In the USA we have a concept of a warrant of merchantability. This implies that if you buy a product that is defective the manufacturer must take it back within a short period usually 30 days or less. No exceptions.
With cars it is slightly different most states have something called a "lemon law." If there are more than three repair attempts in the first 6 months for the same issue and the problem is still not fixed then the manufacturer must offer a full refund.
I did return an iPhone when I was in US. It was really easy just walk in and return it for a full refund or credit. I ended up buying a 128gb one instead of 32gb because the experience was great. But this is insane that I can't return something from Apple's own store for a refund.
OP sold one macbook after 3 months, bought a second one with the same defect, and tried to get that one serviced immediately. That second macbook should've been well within a reasonable returns policy.
This is correct. I got rid of the original one (I bought that day 1 of M1 launch so I thought it was some initial batch). But this one is only a day old (and more recently imported) and I have spent the last day doing all kinds of troubleshooting. I am in the process of getting a replacement (which they approve) but I don't expect that one to be problem free either (seems like a more serious problem like 2016 displays failing after a while). Nonetheless if they can accept a replacement they should have some policy towards a refund but there is none. I am waiting for their call tomorrow from some senior but I am not hopeful.
I don’t think any country has laws mandating that people are allowed to return products after owning them for 3 months.
It depends on the circumstances, but in the UK and most of Europe, consumer rights are much stronger than in some other parts of the world.
Here in the UK, the basic rule is that the vendor who sold a product to a private individual is on the hook for anything that goes wrong -- that is, they can't just pass the buck to a manufacturer under warranty or some other fall guy, they have to deal with the problem or be held responsible. Whether the vendor can in turn recover any losses from the manufacturer or reseller who supplied them is then that vendor's problem, not the end customer's.
Usually if a product is defective, the next step will be to repair, replace or refund. The legal position tends to be based on both sides being reasonable. For example, if you have a product that fails earlier than you might reasonably expect but still after a couple of years of use, you might get a refund for part of the original purchase price but you probably wouldn't be entitled to all of it. On the other hand, if a product fails in the first few months and the vendor can't repair or replace it, you're probably entitled to a full refund and there is a presumption that the product was defective unless the vendor can prove otherwise. In some cases, rights to a partial refund might last as long as 6 years, if the product purchased might reasonably be expected to last that long but that one didn't.
Several other shenanigans that vendors try to pull elsewhere also don't hold up here. You can't rely on dubious arbitration terms in sale contracts to override statutory consumer rights. A vendor also must not mislead consumers over their rights, for example putting up a sign saying "no refunds" when the buyer might have a legal right to a refund for a defective product. In fact, it's actually illegal for merchants to mislead in that kind of way, which is why you'll see often notices up at the tills that say something like "your statutory rights are not affected" to make it clear that they're not trying to illegally misrepresent anything about those rights.
This is all in addition to any more generous policy a merchant might voluntarily offer or any warranty a manufacturer might offer on its products regardless of where someone buys them.
I think it’s reasonable to expect a replacement product, but why should you be able to return it for cash? You already made the decision to buy one, I don’t think it’s Apple’s responsibility if you change your mind.
You made the decision to buy a product. You got a defective one and they offered you a replacement. With the replacement you will be exactly where you set out to be. With less money, and with a working product.
Even in Sweden, consumer law paradise, I’m pretty sure you can’t ask for your money back.
You went in to the relationship with the belief that Apple was a premium vendor. You recieved a product that was not a premium product. What I think is important is: how much work is to get a replacement? That can really sour a relationship, esp when you may get a refurbished machine as a replacement.
He made the decision to buy one that works, if there's a flaw it's perfectly reasonable to be reimbursed.
Most countries also have laws to give consumers a time period where they can return whatever they bought, no questions asked (as long as the product is in good condition)
If I sell you a TV, pretending that it was working perfectly when I know for a fact that there's a component in it that has 90% chances of blowing up in the next month, you'd be perfectly right to complain and expect me to pay you back your money after your TV exploded.
Did you buy it via official reseller? Any reasonable country should have laws in place that will force the company to refund you for the defective goods. In that case Apple' policies shouldn't matter
AFAIK India doesn’t have refund policies for defective goods that are widely applicable.
What OP must clarify though is that apples authorised resellers in India do actually perform a good job of replacing defective goods under warranty, which makes getting extended care for apple products in India of paramount importance. Outside of warranty you are so screwed!
I don't know about your experience but I have been buying Apple products here for more than a decade and the authorized service centers only replace iPhones and iPads (and they now repair iPhones) while macs are repair only. But the so called engineers are not well trained and I did have my MBP once that went bad thanks to the poor job they had done. If apple had an official service center I would not bother replacing or returning and just get it repaired since any repair comes with a 90 day warranty.
That's why I am very hesitant to use it for mass manufactured goods.
ME misses 1 defect showing few months later, and you get n hundred thousand units recall, or worse, the client asking the money back. For a CM it's a complete devastation.
Machining is also very uneconomical unless you can contract high volume machining specialist, but that's impossible for most <1m runs.
Only the biggest PC makers like Asus, and Acer can afford custom casting, and press forging at economical scales, but even they don't go for aluminium everywhere. ASUS for example went with stamped steel shells for some economy models.
Could you elaborate on this? I thought Aluminium is relatively easy to manipulate (and that's why it's used a lot)? Why wouldn't one use injection molding?
That would mostly be limited by tolerances, surface finish and specific alloy used.
When you end up with a part that needs a lot of steps and removes a lot of material you need a machine that is more complicated, more expensive and with a lower throughput than a machine that simply stamps parts out of a sheet, or shapes them through a mandrill.
Casting is a whole other deal, you end up with different properties because the way you cast has different requirements than creating the raw stock. If the part or product you want to make can't match with the results of a cast part (more than just surface finish) you simply can't use casting (until some sort or alloy is found that delivers the required properties).
You can obviously use other methods, i.e. metal injection, or sintering, or you could simply make it out of plastic. Or you make multiple simpler parts and interface them together (screws, glue, welds etc). But all of those are fine from the construction perspective, but not fine from the aesthetic perspective, and those are valid requirements as well.
The manufacturing method generally is selected during a 'design for manufacture' phase, and that phase only comes after you have already established some parameters on the look, feel, and other properties of the product.
If you could just make it out of concrete or a single injected piece of plastic and still meet all the requirements, they would probably do just that (as the process is simpler, cheaper, higher volume etc).
No. Amazon offers a return for it's products if they are defective the second time. Basically you get a replacement if its good then great keep it but if it has a problem as well then you get a full refund on return. Apple has no such policy. You buy it they can offer a replacement. But customer support will tell you its policy for no refund. No law afaik.
Why is this the case? Is there some societal expectation? I know that eg: american grocery stores are much more accepting of returns for any reason vs european ones in general.
There is societal expectation. Frankly no one wants opened/used products, so you know those will be sold at significant discount, or refurbished, or thrown away. No business accepts that unless they HAVE to.
Um ... When I buy for myself I look for open box products all the time. Steep discounts (sometimes 25% or more) are awesome for something that is essentially new. I don't give a shit about the unboxing experience unless it's a gift for someone else.
No one wants used products for "new" prices, but plenty of people would be willing to buy open-box items at discounted prices. It's a huge thing for appliances.
In most situations, however, things are simply repackaged and sold as new. Clothing, for example, is commonly returned; then hopefully re-washed before selling again as new. In most situations this applies to electronics as well, although electronics can be different. There are stories out there of people buying new SD cards that had photos on them. Most companies have a return center that processes returns, inspects them, resets them, and repackages them to be sold again as new.
Exceptions are when returns are sent to stores… like Amazon or Best Buy handle returns differently than returns going back to the manufacturer.
In the USA, "simply repackaged and sold as new" is illegal for all products, even if the first purchaser hadn't even opened the box. You have to sell it as "refurbished" or some such.
Does Apple offer more than the legal minimum in other countries?
I'm curious, I don't know, but in my experience buying Apple products in several countries, they offer the legal minimum nicely, without resistance (which is already better than many corporations), but generally not more than that.
If the legal after-sales minimum is nothing, then that's what I'd expect Apple to offer.
Do most retailers? I haven't researched it or anything but my guess is that most retailers just offer the legal minimum, unless they explicitly have a generous return policy as a differentiating factor (Costco?).
I don't think most stores would offer returns, except it is often forced on them buy credit card companies to protect their consumers.
American Express, Visa, and Mastercard all have some kind of requirement that the merchant allows returns (usually 14 days minimum). Otherwise the consumer can file a chargeback and the resolution will go to the consumer in most situations.
I think good return policies is good for business IF the business is operating in a society that generally behaves ethically on that matter.
If the majority of returns are good faith, just swallow them and keep everything moving smoothly with happy customers.
If you have a critical mass of customers who disregard right vs. wrong and just see a mark to be exploited, you're pretty much forced to behave adversarially, and everyone loses.
I'm fascinated by the granularity of "society" in this case. The amount of trust in Toronto vs. Waterloo vs. where I am now (rural) is quite stark in a number of cases.
I worked at a startup catering to Indian consumers. It was a typical transactional product coupled with offers. The time and energy we spent on fighting different kinds of abuse was outright insane. The fraudsters would come up with a new trick each week to abuse offers. No matter what check we placed (based on e-mail, phone number, IP etc., etc.,) they would beat it.
Based on my experience I can think of a few contributing factors.
1. Indian population. Lot of businesses underestimate this. They are used to reason in terms of %. But when you have a population of 1300 the % could still be within a threshold but absolute number would be larger than entire nations.
2. Outright incompetent cyber policing. The Indian consumers getting access to cheaper smartphone and internet exploded in the 2nd half of last decade. Naturally the country's police have just been unable to scale up to deal with new age crimes.
3. Poverty. It's super lucrative for young poor people to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities and abuse goodwill policies. The return policy is a good example. E-commerce companies in India are riddled with fraudulent return of goods. The modus operandi is simple enough. Order a smart phone, return a faulty/old one of the same model, sell the new one. Profit.
4. Extreme levels of corruption and vast geography. There are some well known cybercrime hotspot PIN codes but chasing the fraudsters is mostly futile. The police are mostly lethargic and more often than not are happy to work with the criminals to collect a weekly payment. It's more lucrative that way, why kill the golden goose?
5. Cheap internet, cheaper SIM connection. The country is awash with cheap bandwidth and SIM connection. To an extent you'll find new SIM packets lying on the sidewalk. This makes it extremely hard to tackle online frauds.
It's been plugged. Though I used smartphone as an example it happens on all kinds of products. High-end fashion clothing, toiletries, jewelry, and so on. Last I heard the return/refund fraud was under control. But its only a matter of time a new angle of attack is found.
I think you'll find that European consumer rights laws leave the US in the dust. It's much easier to refund/return stuff over here because almost everything has a better warranty than the USA.
Apple retail policy in Hong Kong[0] is similar, no 14-day returns unlike most other countries, and even defective refunds seem doubtful (you can see that the policy only specifies conditions for exchange, though it does mention refund procedures it doesn't state when it would occur and so is likely open to interpretation by the management).
Yes Hong Kong has had that since iPhone 4 or 5 if I remember correctly. A few years later Apple said the problem were people abusing the system, basically buying iPhone, taking out some component, or even the Screen, replace them with other parts and sell those official parts for profits. Then returning the iPhone to Apple.
They also raised the price of latest iPhone by $100 since iPhone 5 because of China reselling. So if you exclude VAT or Import TAX, ( which HK doesn't have ), It would be the most expensive iPhone with the least amount of services.
A friend who was on holiday in Turkey was refused a new iphone battery (she was willing to pay for it) at the official Apple store as it was not locally bought (she bought it in SF).
So no global warranty, but also no global repair or replacement of parts with official parts even when you are willing to pay for it.
MacBooks have global warranty, iPhones don't. I think this is partly to avoid price arbitrage such as going to buy an iPhone in a cheaper country. I'm not sure why this is not a concern for laptops. Maybe those are more targeted towards businesses, which are not so price sensitive.
> I think this is partly to avoid price arbitrage such as going to buy an iPhone in a cheaper country.
There isn't much arbitrage for new Apple products: if anything, iPhones are more expensive in other countries, especially LEDC countries due to import tariffs (e.g. Brazil and India) and VAT.
That said, I can understand phone companies, in general, not having worldwide warranties because localized phones will have different radio hardware (well, prior to LTE...).
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I just found Apple's current warranty doc for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod and it does mention international coverage ( https://www.apple.com/legal/warranty/products/ios-warranty-d... ). It would be bad PR for Apple if tourists and businesspeople in foreign countries couldn't get their phones repaired on holiday or during a critical business trip.
That still benefits Apple though as it means the profits from the sale is already repatriated - as opposed to being stuck overseas (see: Apple's cash hoard stuck in Dublin or the Netherlands).
I had a Macbook Pro bought in SF repaired in an Asian country (not India) through an authorized reseller because I had Apple Care. I didn't even have to pay for shipping. The only downside was I had to wait 2 weeks, but I was shocked at how simple and straight forward the process was. 10/10 would buy Apple Care again.
I have a totally different experience. I accidentally submerged my iPhone X in the sea as I got off a boat[1]. The phone although supposedly considered waterproof went mental and basically stopped working. I was flying back via Singapore (a week later) and went into the apple store at the airport. They replaced the phone and got me back up and running before my flight back to London. I live and had bought the phone in the UK. They even had special versions of the UK phone for this scenario.
[1] I was in the Philippines and I was getting off a boat in shallow sea water. My phone was in the bottom pocket of my beach shorts, and I walked through the sea water for maybe two to three metres distance up to waist height depth. This should have been ok for the depth I went.
Their suspicion was that the outer seal had failed (even though it had always been in a case).
>I have a totally different experience. I accidentally submerged my iPhone X in the sea as I got off a boat[1]
You were lucky and got it replaced under goodwill, as iPhone X has an IP67 rating[1] and specific about sea/salt water damage -- the kind you have described. Back home, you would have had to deal with a lot of grief[2].
Yeah, we had a sensible discussion about this in the store. I was calm and respectful but firm. I explained that since I had literally walked through some water, and it had never gone remotely deep or been in for a long time (10-15 seconds?) that it seems entirely reasonable that it should have been fine. I explained that this was sold as waterproof and that anyone reasonable would have expected it to be waterproof for two years. They thought that maybe a scratch had damaged the seal, but they couldn’t see any damage. My phone was in good condition.
I had no idea AppleCare in different countries attempts to get you a phone that matches your origin country. I got a replacement iPhone via AppleCare outside of USA thinking until now that my model was specific to the country I’m staying in, but remarkably it’s an iPhone for Canadian market! Not USA but Canada is close enough for me.
I have replaced the keyboard and battery on my2017 Pro in India that was purchased in US I bought it in2017 and replaced both under applecare in 2020. I had the extended global warranty . They took a week to fix it but worked like a breeze . I paid nothing for it.
Apple India has one of the worst after sales services. If something goes wrong with your device, they'll charge 2.5k (INR) to just look at it and tell you what is wrong with your device.
You have to understand that Apple service in India is outsourced. The sub contractor has no interest in helping you. They only care how they can keep their numbers low.
They charged me $500 to replace the defective keyboard in the Mac Pro 2-3years back within 3 months of purchase and said I put glue on the key which came off.
I have a friend for whose new iphone 10 pro they refused to replace despite servicing the screen thrice and it clearly was manufacturing problem ( they agree) but will not replace the phone only the screen. He spent hours on the phone and no escalation he could do to get them to do it.
Every time i see in Europe or US, the service levels are starkly different, I have got replacement devices in minutes ,it is so bad in India that I and many people I know get their idevices serviced when we vist stateside.
In my experience Americans sort of take for granted the breadth and depth of consumer protection you enjoy. I'd wager that in an insignificant portion of countries Apple expanded to, they have had to significantly cut back on refunds/warrantees they offer to combat fraud and abuse.
Agreed, but I don't think Americans take it for granted; I think they just don't abuse it. By not abusing a good faith return policy you allow the company to provide one that is consumer friendly.
Eh, look what happened to LL Bean, they had one of the last real good faith return policies, and it was abused to hard they had to reverse lifetime warranty on existing products to two(?) years. And create a list to track individuals making the returns
I hear they'll still honor it in some obvious cases...
I worked at a chain pizza place growing up that advertised its money back offer if you didn't like your pizza. When they advertised it I just assumed a lot of people would take advantage of it.
Our store was one of the busiest in the US for a single store. One guy ... just one guy abused it regularly. Beyond him almost nobody ever took advantage of the offer at all... Easy enough for the store manager to tell that guy to knock it off and there ya go.
What I assumed was a crazy / unwise policy, effectively cost them nothing, hardly was ever used, didn't require any new processes at all, and amounted to just a advertising slogan.
People are probably more embarrassed to ask for their money back on something they have partially or entirely eaten. I can barely muster up the courage to tell my waiter that my dinner order wasn't quite right but I have zero problem with buying a couple different versions of a product and returning the ones I don't like.
That's interesting - I hate wasting food, I have never complained about my order (and not planning too, unless the food is spoiled I guess). If I don't like the food, I'll just never order again from the same place. I would definitely appreciate a company that offers money refund on food "no questions asked" even if I was never going to use it - it shows respect.
If I were the manager I'd just say, if the guy calls, let me talk to him, and then tell him "It doesn't seem you really like our pizzas, we don't want to ruin your dinner, so why don't you order somewhere else?".
A better manager would figure out how to keep him as a paying customer...
> In my experience Americans sort of take for granted the breadth and depth of consumer protection you enjoy.
As a european, it's amusing to hear you say that as the majority of European countries have far, far more stringent consumer-protection regs than the US, such as mandatory 2 year warranties, distance-selling laws, legal rights to a refund or replacement, and so on. Apple's 90 day warranty is a joke when you can buy the same product, for almost the same price after factoring-in VAT, with a 2 year warranty only a 5 hour flight away...
And everywhere in EU sellers have to accept a return within 14 days for any online purchases, for any reason. And no, they can't charge a restocking fee. You can only be asked to pay for the postage back.
And in general, the responsibility for the goods is always with the seller first, manufacturer second. If your laptop breaks and the seller says "oh the manufacturer declined warranty" then sorry, tough luck, it's the seller who has to repair/replace it now.
Almost. It does not apply to custom-made products. Apple resellers consider BTO models to be custom-made and thus not eligible for this protection. But at least they warn you upfront.
> Apple resellers consider BTO models to be custom-made and thus not eligible for this protection.
I thought the only get-out for Apple was personalized items, namely those with laser-engraving. BTO/JIT orders where you choose from a narrow set of options (e.g. RAM size, HDD size, etc) in Apple's case probably wouldn't be BTO because they tend to pre-assemble a modest stockpile of all of the different BTO configs.
Lower-volume products, like the $6000 Mac Pro might have a case, but it's not like a returned (but new, even unopened) MacPro isn't resalable...
I was purchasing BTO MBP (I would think a popular config at that) in December and got that notice... Apple itself might not do that, but we don't have them here (not all EU countries have the presence), and they probably don't take the return from the resellers.
In the EU however, you generally are paying for that extra protection in the form of higher prices from retailers. There's no free lunch. The market isn't perfectly efficient, but it's pretty damn efficient. It's not like companies operating in countries where warranty is the law will suddenly say "welp, I guess we'll just have to accept less profit in the EU then, hopefully global consumers don't catch on!"
Whether you pay for extra protections via higher prices automatically (EU) or as an a la carte add-on (US) is irrelevant. On a risk adjusted basis, the cost is the same.
The EU simply cuts off the consumer's ability to take more risk for lower cost. They force you to buy the warranty every time.
I'm honestly curious - how so? In all my adult life I have been comparing prices between EU and US and they are always about the same once you factor in taxes. Yes the VAT can make items slightly more expensive, but VAT has absolutely nothing to do with the retailers responsibility for the product, right?
>>On a risk adjusted basis, the cost is the same.
I'd love to see how you came to that conclusion. In EU the seller is always responsible for 2 years after sale for the product, in the US a 2 year warranty will be few hundred dollars on laptops and other expensive items. The difference is definitely not the same.
This has been the subject of numerous academic papers. Again, it's not like the EU government has somehow fooled companies into losing money in the EU.
I highly doubt you're doing true absolute calculations factoring in all the supply chain, macroeconomic, and tax considerations.
The reason you can't easily compare this at a glance is complicated by currency fluctuations, shipping costs, labor costs, embedded VAT in prices vs. taxes added at purchase, VAT rebates, differences in EU warranty law vs. purchased warranties in the US, "discount" marketing tactics of American retailers vs. European retailers, everyday low prices vs. seasonal discounting, etc.
Trust me when I say you're not enjoying some free lunch at the expense of corporate earnings by living in the EU. You're simply restricting consumer and entrepreneur choices, by preemptively deciding what the consumer needs.
Which can be good or bad depending on the item in question. Computer hardware? Not sure we need the nanny state involved, there's healthy competition and you run the risk of stifling new business models from arising (it's no secret that Europe isn't exactly a hotbed of tech innovation). Healthcare? Now that's a different story.
> This has been the subject of numerous academic papers.
Those papers sound interesting. Can you recommend any?
>it's no secret that Europe isn't exactly a hotbed of tech innovation
When you mean innovation, do you refer to Xerox and Bell Labs? Or to Microsoft and Apple? Cause europe has a lot of the first kind, not much of the second kind. And even when they do, they might end being sold out. Like Nokia and Skype.
>>Trust me when I say you're not enjoying some free lunch at the expense of corporate earnings by living in the EU. You're simply restricting consumer and entrepreneur choices, by preemptively deciding what the consumer needs.
I mean, I do see your point. But we as a society have decided that sellers should be responsible for a minimum of 2 years for any items they sell. That's just what we (society) require from anyone willing to run a business. We also require them not to dump toxic waste into rivers, and pay their taxes - all enterpreneurs the world over have certain obligations to the state, US just placed the bar lower than elsewhere. I don't mean to say which approach is "right", but I do mean to say that as a consumer I like having greater protections in the EU, even if "perhaps" it means the products bought here cost more.
Companies absolutely accept and expect different margins in different countries, just look at drug prices. Companies maximize their margins in the markets they participate in.
You are right that it is not a free lunch it’s just a difference in the margin.
You could also argue that two year warranties in the us are priced obscenely (like drugs).
Aren’t the customers who don’t return their purchases subsidizing the cost of the ones who do? I’d much prefer to pay a restocking fee (or to have more stringent return policies) if it meant I could pay a little less up front.
I mean...what a weird way to look at it. Yes I suppose you're right but we as a society decided that if sellers want to sell things remotely(online, through post, through telephone sales) then it's only fair that customers have the right to inspect the item and return it if they don't like it. You don't have that right if you bought the item in a physical store because you could inspect the item there.
That is why you used to read about Apple's exceptional services. They are and only happens in the state. Such as free repair for certain thing or giving cheaper discount to repair etc. In EU and UK those services are expected.
Now Apple doesn't do it. They push you to buy a new product whenever possible along with AppleCare+. Apple Retail employees dont run on commission in US ( Not sure if that is still the case). I remember someone said Apple Retail Italy runs on commission basis. I also know Apple Retail employees also has KPI based on AppleCare+ they sold in the past few years.
Yes.... the whole Apple Retail experience is going against how Steve Job originally envisioning it. For Tim Cook, it is nothing more than a cost center on balance sheet.
I used the US Apple website, and the French Apple website in that case (in €, converted to USD using WolframAlpha and accounting for 20% VAT). I've already seen in the past that the Spanish and German Apple websites have similar prices to the French one.
My experience in Europe was that the result of those laws is businesses that operate within the letter of the law, whereas in the US they often operate more generously.
For example Apple in the US let me return a first gen 12.9” iPad Pro after about 4 months and exchange it for the 9.7” version the week it came out.
I would have expected a flat out no from retailers in Europe.
Apple had a lot of trouble with the Indian market back the early 2010s. They had to pull AppleCare+ out of the country because people were abusing it a lot. [†]
Same goes for the country's biggest online retailers, both Amazon and Flipkart also switched to a replacement-only policy in India.
"Most analysts agree that many many buyers were abusing the company's refund policy. With many buying latest smartphones, and returning them after a week after trying them "[1]
I've seen return abuse in the US, not sure if it's higher than what I have seen in India. I tried to research this topic back in high school for a paper, it was hard to find concrete data to compare the two countries.
[†] edit: I feel like I need to clarify what "abusing" really was.
AppleCare+ used to cover two incidents of Theft, Loss and accidents.
Third party resellers essentially activated an iphone and marked it as lost. Then, after getting a new replacement iPhone from Apple, they would go on and sell it to customers.
Nowadays, you can only get AppleCare (not the plus) in India which does not cover theft or accidental damage.
This has helped e-commerce grow significantly in India just because people are busy and getting around is always a chore (especially with brands like Nykaa, Myntra, and Ajio)
This model would work great to bring more developing countries on board with e-commerce
Agreed, also the traffic in Indian metros like Delhi and Bangalore (and increasingly smaller metros like Jaipur) is horrible. That has certainly helped local e-commerce brands like Myntra and Ajio grow.
It's interesting how these clothing retailers still offer a very customer friendly return policy compared to electronics retailers like Amazon or Apple.
Maybe it's a status symbol thing. Rent a designer electronic for an important meeting or a date or something to look good. Return it afterwards and get your money back.
If you had a Star Trek replicator in your home that could replicate a brand new iPhone for you for free that lasts a week then poofs out of existence, you'd go ahead and use it, probably more than once.
If you don't mind the hassle and the ethical, er, annoyance of going to a store, waiting in queues, having $1000+ temporarily blocked off from your savings, a bunch of back and forth with the sales people, etc, then that's equivalent to replicating yourself an iPhone for a week for free.
I knew of a guy who "bought" Apple Laptops from Amazon and used it as his DJ laptop and worked some gigs where the Apple laptop was a status symbol of how big a deal he is. He used to perform in small town and rural India and organizers paid him ₹3k-30k per night. He returned his laptop after doing 3-4 such gigs in the "marriage season" in India. He did this 7-8 times from different addresses and different accounts.
If you're living gig to gig, spending the earnings from a couple may not be an option. Doesn't justify what's being done, I'm just arguing against this single argument.
After 21 gigs (3 gigs * 7 laptops) he would've made around 21k USD (presuming he was making at least 10k rupees per night, which between 3k-30k would've made sense). Seems like at that point you just buy the darn laptop, it's not like you need something more than an Air for DJing, and 1/21th of your revenue to be legal seems like not a bad idea.
You’re missing the point. Why buy something if you don’t have to? That’s the reasoning here. You don’t spend money, your product doesn’t depreciate, you always have a brand new product. You only have to deal with your guilt and ethics or lack thereof.
He is a scammer. He had no DJ training either. To most people living in rural India, "DJ" is just loud beats added to an existing song and abruptly cutting them and playing another one. He is not a real DJ, and he had bills to pay.
No, he mostly got paid ₹3-₹4k per night. Purchasing power of rural India is very low.
Many people also abuse return policies to buy expensive cameras, use them to shoot nice pictures on vacation and then sending them back. They can still keep the pictures, so the camera lost its value for them.
If I were to wager as to the single most common type of fraud of this type, I would guess it is women "buying" a dress with the intent to wear it once and return it.
This is also why the terms on rental cars can get very specific.
I don't blame them, it is shocking how much dresses cost. As a man, a well-tailored suit will last me a decade, waistline permitting. Nobody will ever say, 'Uh, you're wearing that suit AGAIN?' The rest of the time a simple blazer and button down shirt will do the job.
I mentioned it because it seems the most socially acceptable and common example of this kind of behavior.
Now that I think of it, the "eat the steak then complain" tactic is probably the most common that's in this ballpark.
Personally, I do judge the people I've seen do this. They are self-centered and all did it for social reasons. If someone did it for a job interview I might understand, but invariably it was to have something they didn't want to pay for.
>Why would people want to have an iPhone for only a week?
Indian culture is about display of wealth. Wealthy individuals are respected and get access to inner clubs while the people who don't have much don't get invited anywhere.
College students might want to leave a good impression at a party and might get an iPhone so people start taking them seriously.
Similarly, a guy might get an iPhone so his date considers him important.
iPhone is status symbol in India because not everyone can afford it.
I can certainly and easily afford it but I am still using android because I don't feel the need of uncessarry attention
Germany is such culture and it still happens with accessories and clothing.
Apple is at the centre of this. You see people who obviously can't afford it with those (probably) fake AirPods all over the place. Sometimes they're not even connected. It's THE "look at me, I can afford it" electronics brand display for the middle and lower class.
I disagree with categorizing this as abuse. The company was offering a refund policy. The customers were using it.
My friend Kevin used to test out different GPUs when he was writing a game engine. He'd buy one, install it on his computer, run the engine, then return it a few days later. They often had a 10% restocking fee. Was he abusing policy?
It's the same sort of logic banks use to justify "identity theft." Ah yes, it's the fault of the customer, not the banks' poor verification methods.
That said, it's true that when large amounts of people do a thing, you'll have to adjust policy. But it's not their fault for taking advantage of policies they're legally allowed to use, and that the company freely offers.
Are we going to blame people for not buying WinRaR licenses next? These are businesses, they offer the policy for a variety of reasons, I am free to use them within the terms; it sounds a bit out there to categorise returning a product in a “no questions asked return” policy as unethical unless I actively sabotaged the product or did anything other than use it and give it back.
Not that you don't make a point with this, I do have to say that Winrar hasn't changed how they handle their licensing/usage to combat this. I suspect they're "okay" with it so to speak as a result.
The fact that businesses change their policies as a result of abuse should tell you whether these actions are within the spirit of what they intended or whether it's outside of it.
I find it unethical because the net effect is that companies stop offering friendly return policies. When people treat return policies by the letter of the agreement rather than by its spirit, they create a world where companies won't offer relaxed return policies, and therefore make the world a bit worse for everyone else.
It's not illegal to use the agreement in this way, and I would never try to make it so. But I would absolutely look down on someone for behaving this way.
No, that isn't the point of that at all. 10% isn't so you can use a card and then give it back. 10% is so the staff can package it up, send it back to the manufacturer so they can resell it. Or so they can mark it as "refurbished" and recoup some of the lost value of a new card.
There you go "some" of the value. So either the store or the manufacturer eats the rest of the lost value, in either case the person using the policy at face value is taking value. In a lot of cases taking value would be stealing, but this is one of those cases where there's only a social contract and a set of norms that guard it and it's not seen as such. Think of a complementary offering of some kind based on an honor system, some treat or trinket in a bowl. Sure you can take just one or take them all. If you take them all you can argue that they're free but you're still a that guy that helps bring about a tragedy of the commons.
Culturally in the states and Latin America that makes you jerk and people will hate you for it. So there is social pressure in place to help regulate those events, but it may not always be the case everywhere.
The 10% restocking fee is a compromise between offerring a permissive return policy that gets abused and none at all. I have always understood it to be a deterrent and not the exact amount that must be recouped in order to make returns net zero loss events.
This disconnect is precisely why you can get a refund in the US but not in India.
There's the "letter of the policy" interpretation, where anything the text of the policy doesn't explicitly forbid is A-Okay. And then there's the "socially acceptable norms" interpretation, where you're only supposed to ask for refunds when a product is actually defective, and if you go any further than that, society and HN comments will shame you for it.
In the US, we have a thriving culture of shaming people for anything and everything, so companies can have generous policies and lean on the social norms interpretation to keep people in check. India is more of a free-for-all, so companies feel the need to spell everything out.
> In the US, we have a thriving culture of shaming people for anything and everything, so companies can have generous policies and lean on the social norms interpretation to keep people in check.
Consumers in US can buy a product without the anxiety of not having read the fine print, knowing that the seller will honor the return policy. Sellers also end up selling more because most buyers like the product they buy. Society wins overall.
I have lived both in India and US, about two decades each at both places.
I think the calling out is justified. Having lived in India, it is a country filled with these Smart Alecks who ruin it for everyone. I find it the duty of the general public to call these out, if we want to keep good things.
Yes, he was abusing it. The refund policy is for if you're really unsatisfied with the product. If you buy a product with the intent to return it for refund, that's abuse.
Your position seems to be that if it's legal and within the technical guidelines, then it's not abuse. If so then what is abuse?
I think the issue is people operating in bad faith. I recall a story about people buying big TVs before the super bowl then returning them the next week. My opinion is that's abusing a company's generous return policy. The people doing that never intended to buy. The company had the policy to give customers more confidence in their purchases, not to run a free TV rental business.
There's a saying "this is why we can't have nice things". If people constantly push leniency or generosity to the limits, they get taken away, and it's a net loss to everybody else.
I counter with the following observation: You note that a return policy exists so that customers can use it. Under what conditions are you allowed to use it and it not be abuse?
Being able to return the product is often why customers buy something. How many times have you considered the return policy before buying? You can decide to return it for any reason you like: whether you dislike the product, whether you ran out of money and needed a refund, or for no reason at all.
If it's a problem, the business will change the policy, just as Apple did here.
> Under what conditions are you allowed to use it and it not be abuse?
If your plan wasn't to return it from the start, then it isn't abuse. This seems pretty simple. In your original example your "friend" was planning on using GPUs to test and then return them. At no point was he planning on keeping this purchase.
Now, I will say if you're friend bought 3 GPU's with the plan to keep one and returned two I would say that's not abuse, but there are certainly better ways to try before you buy.
There is a definite benefit to giving good faith customers confidence in their ability to return something if they aren't satisfied with it. If the majority of customers are not acting in good faith (meaning never intend to keep the item) that position becomes untenable for the business and as you state the terms are changed. The alternative is to drastically increase the price so that customers who actually want to purchase it can subsidize those that don't.
I'm not sure whether there's an ethical problem with acting in that way, but it resembles a "tragedy of the commons" situation. Or, "this is why we can't have nice things".
> Under what conditions are you allowed to use it and it not be abuse?
I'll give you an example, which is also a true story: I bought a 4K TV that could also run Android apps. But, while regular TV broadcasts displayed in 4K, the Android apps were limited to HD. This, of course were never mentioned in any of their marketing material. Did return, and did get a refund, but if it had worked as I thought it did, I would have kept it.
It's simple to me. The policy is based on "good faith" that people won't lie and abuse the return policy as a free rental.
You claim it's okay to follow the letter of the policy and abuse it. When too many people do that the policy is removed.
Result: You live in a culture where returns are disallowed.
Me, I'd prefer to live in a culture where returns are allowed. That only happens when people don't abuse the return policy. The fact that Apple changed their policy because people abused it is a loss for everyone that had no intention of abusing it. It's even a loss for those who were abusing it if they ever have a legit reason to want to return something.
There are a many many policies that only really work on social norms. Living in a society that respects those norms is "almost" always a nicer society to live in.
> The business offers a policy. You're simply using it.
There is the spirit and the letter of an agreement. The relative importance of these in commercial contexts varies from culture to culture. (The term of art is high trust versus low trust societies.) Abuse (versus breach) involves complying with the letter of an agreement while violating its spirit. As you observe, this is subjective.
Fundamentally, if return policies are treated by customers as a return versus rental, terms can be more generous. If they are abused, the terms must be stricter.
I want to participate in a market where businesses typically offer refunds. When too many people use refund policies in that way, businesses stop offering them. That makes things worse for me, so I wish they wouldn't do that.
I don't know if that rises to definition of abuse, but that's why I don't want people to use refunds that way.
The consquence of everyone "simply using" returns policies in that way is businesses having much more restrictive returns policies, as we see in India. Most of us don't want that.
Yes. Here, abuse means misuse, which must be interpreted relative to the intent of the ones making the policy (or else it's meaningless). The intent is clear: for customers to be able to return the item if they are not satisfied. It is not a borrow/rental policy.
This is definitely abuse. The policy is there does not mean customer can use it in whatever way you like. The company honor the policy also does not mean the consumer is not abusing the policy.
Remember Costco permanently blocked some consumers due to abusing the return policy? Costco honors the policy, but those consumers were still considered as abusing the policy.
Exactly. That's Costco's right, and it's an example of the system working as intended.
Let me ask you this. Do you agree with illegal copyright infringement being classified as "piracy"? My issue here is the terminology. It's deceptive to classify this behavior as "abuse," as if someone was kicking a puppy.
It's an asshole thing to do, but it's not abuse. No one is doing anything illegal, and everyone is free to feel however they wish about their morals.
Renting or Wardrobing: When someone buys an item specifically on a short-term basis with the intent to return it, this is known as renting or wardrobing. An example is buying a dress for a special occasion and returning it after it has been worn."
"Wardrobing might sound like an innocent thing to do—after all, many of us have returned something we've already worn at least once in our lives. But the truth is that wardrobing is actually considered "return fraud."
Again, you keep referencing links that have nothing to do with the issue at hand.
- In a recent Florida case , a Miami socialite, Meghana Rajadhyaksha, was found guilty for purchasing over $130k in designer purses from retail giant TJ MAXX and also purchasing similar knock-offs from Amazon where she swapped the designer tags out and returned the Amazon knock-offs to TJ MAXX to receive a full refund.
I agree this is fraud! That's literally deceiving in order to receive money. There's nothing deceptive about using a policy that the store offers.
- The Florida statutes define return fraud as obtaining or using a receipt in a fraudulent manner
Ditto.
You're free to keep repeating that I have no idea what I'm talking about and so on, but at this point it's becoming quite boring for readers, and everything has been said. We simply agree to disagree, and that's that.
Now, please stop calling me a criminal. It's not nice, and it's also not accurate.
If you dig up a single case of someone being prosecuted for using a policy that the store offers, without modifying the receipt or the item, let me know.
Although wardrobing is, arguably, unethical, there are no statutes or case law that specifically render it illegal. Whether wardrobing should even be considered an abuse of retail policies would depend on the retailers’ specific return policies. Some retailers welcome returns of clothing in any condition, therefore, one can hardly argue that the return of any item, in any condition is an abuse of that policy.
We can sit here and cite sources all day at each other, or you can find a case of someone being prosecuted for wardrobing. Once you do, I would be more than happy to listen and to change my mind on the issue.
In case it helps, I currently live in Seattle, and the story I related in my original comment happened in Boston, I believe. I'm also about to be moving back to Missouri. (You seem to be focusing on Florida for some reason, so I thought I'd give you a few trails to follow.)
I bow out of this discussion since you are clearly looking for a fight, and seem to be having a bad day. I hope your day improves.
(Once more, I gave you information about (a) where I live, and therefore where the relevant laws are, and (b) pointed out that there are many, many citations saying that Wardrobing is an asshole move (as I said) but not illegal. That is my basis for rejecting your claims. It's not impossible to search the case law for someone being prosecuted for Wardrobing, and I encourage you to do so; if you find someone who has been convicted under any state law, I would be genuinely interested in hearing about it, since that would likely change my mind. Irrelevant sources, however, won't.)
I totally believe this. Here in the states Costco's refund policy is like magic. If you buy something that is horrible, you can return it hassle free. I buy almost exclusively from costco just because of this policy. Zero stress.
But something like this would not work in Bolivia (where I'm from), people would abuse the shit out of it. within a week the policy would be gone, no doubt.
One of my friends works at Costco. He says that before the holidays they sell a lot of furniture and after the holidays they see a lot of furniture returns.
I've seen shameless bastards return christmas trees in january lol - but still as a whole the majority of people in the states don't abuse policies like that.
Is the implication that people are buying extra furniture for having family or other guests over, with the intent of returning it after the guests leave?
But wouldn't that be expected? More people buying (because they think they need it, as they're going to cook a lot), would mean, even if the return percentage is the same, more people returning.
Add to that the people who realize what a waste of an investment that was after the holiday spree is over, you can explain it a bit more.
But of course, it's impossible to tell surely without data.
Going back to gut feelings: Does he see suspicious behavior? Weird reasons for returning?
He does not work the returns desk, he is primarily a forklift driver. I find it interesting to hear about the seasonal variations though.
A couple random things - the first stack of shelves that face the front of the store are managed to give a good impression. They always keep those shelves full of pallets and try to have a lot of only a few items to give a clean look. If the warehouse has empty space they try to keep it so you can't see from the center of the store.
The Costco I worked at had a lady that came in every holiday season and bought over $10k of holiday decorations. Like clockwork she'd be back in January to return it all, nearly all of it having been opened and used. She'd been doing this for almost a decade by the time I started working there.
It's gonna be impossible to concretely discern intent from the data you could get, but it's pretty obvious there's _some_ abuse. The only question is where you draw the line on abuse and how much.
January at our store was a rush of returns of opened and used Christmas decorations because "I decided I don't want it anymore." Often times from people that had done the same thing year after year. We'll never know what those people really intended when they bought it in the fall, but you'd have to be pretty damn charitable to assume the best of intent in all the cases. Especially when it was people doing it multiple years in a row.
A number of outdoor gear stores like REI and (sorta) LL Bean have discontinued lifetime returns during the past few years. I've known people who used policies as sort of a lifetime subscription to, say, a rain jacket. I'm not sure the reason the policies eventually changed.
I assume it's some combination of degraded quality as most stuff is made in the same Asian factories and an increasingly widespread attitude that it's OK to take anything that isn't nailed down.
This was also really common with TVs during the Super Bowl. People would come in and buy the biggest TV they could get, have their Super Bowl party and then return the TV.
That why the Costco policy no longer applies to electronics (they’re time-limited now). But it’s at manager discretion, so if you seem to have a genuine problem they’ll still take something back after the limit.
That was less about the Superbowl returns (the return window on electronics is 90 days, you can easily get a TV, have a Superbowl party, and return it still).
It's more the depreciation and how quickly electronics evolve. People were using the returns as a free lifetime of upgrades.
One particularly stark example when I worked there a long time ago was someone who wanted to upgrade their old projection TV.
So four years after they bought it they brought it in and returned it. They got about $4k back. They walked out on the floor, picked up a brand new LCD TV for $2k and almost half a decade after their original purchase they walked out with a brand new, upgraded TV and $2k in their pocket.
You can imagine how this can be abused with most electronics that Costco sells. Imagine going in and getting a brand new upgraded laptop every 2-3 years for the rest of your life after a single couple thousand dollar purchase.
Yes. Electronics are 90 days any reason. Any non-electronics it's "lifetime for any reason".
I saw someone return a flat of steaks with half a remaining cooked steak left just saying "my guests thought they weren't very good".
Someone had a custom photo book printed and when they came to pick it up decided they didn't want it anymore and just got a refund.
Someone returned a plasma TV because of the glare from their windows.
My wife bought a car seat there (something you can't return _anywhere_) which we ended up not being able to get installed in the car (had the shitty cheap version of the LATCH clips that are impossible to get tightened up). Took it back for a full refund.
We bought a vacuum there that broke literally a week after the manufacturer's warranty. Brought it in and exchanged it for a new one.
There's no time limit on any of this.
This is by no means normal in North America. It's one of those Costco things like providing part time retail workers reasonable salaries and health benefits, etc that sounds insane in theory but obviously works for them.
I know personally there's been a couple times where I've been on the fence about buying something and ended up purchasing it because "If it sucks/falls apart in 6 months/whatever I can just bring it back."
I suspect it's the same story I heard in Poland - it's basically impossible to buy insurance against loss of mobile phone, because apparently people abused it too much. You can still get insurance against theft or damage, but not for loss. It was just too easy for people to say "yeah, I lost the phone, please send a new one thanks".
But I mean, those policies exist elsewhere, so I don't know what specifically makes Polish customers more prone to abusing those policies. I suspect it's the relative cost of a phone vs income.
I can't speak for Poland, but for India the primary reason such services can't exist is - culture.
India is basically a "low trust society". People in general have a mindset of "scarcity" and at every stage of their lives they try to micro-optimize for what's the best for them at that time. In the absence of good institutions, this often means that we get stuck in shitty Nash equilibria which have terrible, terrible outcomes for everyone involved, but are difficult to get out of.
It is not that everyone in India has no morals or behaves terribly. But the number of people who do are enough to spoil trust-based models that work in other countries by making them too expensive.
From a business point of view, the obvious question is - how do you create a circle of "trustworthy" people? If you could create such a circle, you could offer them special services (better return policies, lower rates for insurance and credit etc) to encourage them to consume more without worrying so much about abuse. This is one of the most exciting business problems in India and solving it is worth at least worth 10 billion dollars and that is probably an underestimate.
There is one company already that claims to have solving this problem as their primary long-term vision - Cred and that company is currently valued at > $2 billion even though currently their revenues are weak and any connection to the long term trust problem quite distant.
I think #1 is a signal of a failure in the online retail space. As a customer other than reading the (often gamed) reviews on amazon and watching youtube reviewers how do you know what to buy? Buying a bunch of options and returning them starts to look like a legitimate strategy. For some products (for me it tends to be laptops) you really do not know if you like it until you have your hands on the physical product.
I agree. I myself have noticed how bad all reviews have gotten. For example, I bought an S20 FE last year, and it had a horrible touch screen. Almost EVERYONE who bought one said the same thing and complained. I can think of zero 'reviewers' who even mentioned it. I would be supremely angry if it were a $1200 device with no return policy.
I don't really know what the solution is. I think a phone rental business could spring up. Charge $10/day or something to rent a high end phone to folks to see how they like it.
Bestbuy still has mostly functional phones. I recently went by my local one to play with a Pixel 4A before buying it there unlocked. When I worked at Radioshack (2010-2013) we had mostly dummy phones except for the companies that were desperate enough to have "dumb" demo phones that felt like a real phone but just played a looped video on the screen.
My guess is that Bestbuy has more money so they can afford the rare demo phone getting stolen somehow. Funnily enough when I worked at Radioshack we often had people steal the fake phones that just played a video loop. Someone even tried to return a fake phone once saying that we sold them a broken device.
Most of the tech review channels are focused on getting views, sponsors and free product samples. Unsurprisingly the videos increasingly resemble infomercials, focused more on lifestyle and aesthetics than whether or not the product is actually worth buying.
I considered it, but I think an open box item is worth considerably less.
Think of it - if you are spending $1200 on an item, would you want to save $20 on it to get one that who knows who had for who knows how long? I sure wouldn't. You'd probably need to go at least $100 lower before it becomes somewhat appealing.
Bestbuy just charges a 15% restocking fee on all phones returns now if you opened the box. As someone who often has buyers remorse or didn't get an adequate experience in store first I'm completely fine with that.
AppleCare+ covered two incidents of Theft, Loss and accidents.
Third party resellers essentially activated an iphone and marked it as lost. Then, after getting a new replacement iPhone from Apple, they would go on and sell it to customers.
Nowadays, you can only get AppleCare (not the plus) in India which does not cover theft or accidental damage.
Remember Apple sells its refurbished products. Yes it costs them (and as sales increase they also get more returns) to refurbish and sell them back but not accepting returns or refunds is a completely anti-consumer and not a customer friendly policy for a company that claims is all about the customer.
If Apple can’t effectively administrate their nice plans and the consequence is that a few abusers ruin it for everyone, then it’s better for customers to not have it. Too bad.
20 years ago in the US I had friends in college that would shop for clearance items at places like Office Depot and return them to Walmart for full price (no receipt needed). In one situation there was like a $20 ancient keyboard that Walmart still had in their system for ~$100.
It's not as bad in US and reason is purely economics of fraud.
Very large fraction of US population is paid $30 an hour compared to Indian population which makes scamming not worth the trouble
I live in India and I've worked in the US I know Indians just have too much time at their hand, so even schemes which take a lot of your time with little payoff are worth it here.
And the reason people don't use their time to achieve something more productive like starting companies etc...is because government procedures are very hard to understand, and you get penalties left and right, even starting a micro industry like machining shop is hard, power is not available continuously even at top industrial zones in India, fixed cost of electricity connection is high in industrial area and government is very insensitive to business owners so only very large and the ones close to policies are able to navigate.
The biggest problem isn't even market in India which has lot of demand, it's the costs you didn't plan for which seem low on surface the deeper you dig, the costs just keep increasing untill you are left with nothing and in debt so starting a business isn't very popular here and people limit the size of their success to not get in trouble.
India has had trouble shaking the socialist mud off it's boots. Back in the late 40's and 50's huge numbers of bureaucratic make-work jobs were created. A thicket of state and local permits and rules have crippled India to this day. There are few large scale Korean Chaebols - instead there is a frenzy of small shops.
Now all these bureacrats and small shops are a force to be reckoned with as the rationalize production millions of people would be turfed out of their feather-beds and made to work.
Ask any man from India - India will only prosper in the Chinese way if they change.
Yes, thanks for the moral support. The greed and corruption endemic in India is what held it back (after the UK holding it back was done, the Indians well showed they could self exploit to this day)
I’ve been in Mexico for a few months and it sort of the same situation here. Sometimes I find it outright bizarre how hostile the government is to simple things that would allow people to improve their station in life on their own with a business.
>Same goes for the country's biggest online retailers, both Amazon and Flipkart also switched to a replacement-only policy in India.
On Amazon India you can still get refund based on your history with them.
Basically trusted customers still get the "refund" option in their account. Just new customers and the suspecious one aren't given that often by default
> With many buying latest smartphones, and returning them after a week after trying them "[1]
That alone is not only OK but was recommended recently in the USA.
Specifically, during COVID the Apple retail shops were shut so you couldn't compare devices when shopping. I bought my GF a regular and max sized iPhone and she took a week to decide which one she wanted. We sent the other one back and had a refund before the credit card bill was even due, so as far as my bank account was concerned I really did only pay for one. In normal times we would have been unlikely to have bothered with this (although with something as personal as a phone...)
I can imagine that this only scales to a certain percentage of transactions though.
It's really strange to see that on HN when a company is paying only the taxes it legally has to, it's called "business acumen", but when a person is extracting all the value it can from a policy, it's "abusing the policy".
I wonder if the same people hold both the opinions.
This is a very astute observation. There seems to be an assumption that only people, but not organizations can act in bad faith - and that deceiving the government is a virtue.
Seems like reporting a phone as lost without losing it would be the equivalent of lying about income, which is generally recognized as tax fraud, not business acumen.
Not entirely disagreeing with you, but if we want to stop companies from avoiding tax, we should change the tax code.
Apple has gone and done the analog of that; they've changed the returns code.
I don't see anything wrong with what Apple has done here, and if the US decided to tighten up the tax code, I wouldn't see anything wrong with that either.
To your actual point, I think it's about intent and spirit. The holes in the tax code were put there intentionally, to benefit businesses. We may not like it, but that's how it is. Businesses aren't violating the letter or even the spirit of the law when they avail themselves of it.
On the contrary, Apple sets their return policy based on a balance between good customer service and an estimate of how much that customer service will cost them to provide. They likely estimate this cost based on what they think is reasonable customer behavior. In this case they mis-estimated: apparently Indians don't behave within what they consider to be the spirit of that policy.
Another way of looking at it: the US government estimates tax revenue knowing that those loopholes exist, and is fine with the result. There are no budget-related surprises. Apple's estimates for the cost of returns in India was a large underestimation, so they're fixing their problem.
Maybe it's an overreaction to think about this as "returns abuse", but I don't see these two things as being the same.
A legislator implementing a tax code is not an all-seeing god able to divine all the consequences of their proposed law. They have an intent, sure, but to say that every consequence of their actions are intentional, that's too simplistic.
The result, which is that large corporations have a tax rate lower than small businesses, is what is important. Do you want a company, as it grows bigger and spends more on the legal implications of its business structure, to be able to lower its tax rate? Do you want to incentivize bigger companies to have more tax agility than smaller ones? I don't, and I don't believe any legislator would hold such unpopular views.
> A legislator implementing a tax code is not an all-seeing god able to divine all the consequences of their proposed law. They have an intent, sure, but to say that every consequence of their actions are intentional, that's too simplistic.
I'm paid very well for my job as a manager, but I cannot divine all the consequences of my management. I'm sure I've empowered and stifled beyond my intent. Legislators are the same; they're ultimately just human.
I see it other way around. When company does legal tax saving , they are morally bankrupt and monsters. When individuals try to rip off company due to some mistake or even better something like pirady then it is usually "what other choice do people have?". If companies do not give them for cheap, they will have to pirate.
How is this scamming or abuse? There is a return window that people are taking advantage of whose purpose it to let unsure people decide whether they want the device or not. People are using this promise at face value and then being called abusers and scammers
It’s abuse because people buy it with the intent to return it. Buying it and then honestly changing your mind is fine, but Amazon probably determined that wasn’t the case here.
Why does India seem to be so full of scammers? I can't go a day without an Indian robocalling me and trying to phish my credit card or SS#. Is this something engrained in the culture?
Because of your stupid statement about it being ingrained in the culture. It's more like a combination of unemployment, English know-how, ineffective/overworked police because of underfunding, the existence of this attack vector and a little tech knowledge to exploit it.
You're on HN and it's supposed to have somewhat better discourse, don't bring the quality of this site down. Next time try googling the population (!), per capita income, rates of English profiency and technical know-how, international phone calling prices, unemployment rates of the two countries... and apply some basic statistics / common sense. There are just some of the factors, there are probably more.
As an Indian I agree with what you said. Hell one top government official recently said Indians are by nature mostly non law-abiding people.
There are innumerable street smart sayings used even by otherwise educated and well paid folks which just amount to "Benefit by hook or crook and fuck this world".
Largely the same reasons that genuine call centers, IT support and other technical functions are often outsourced to India: a large pool of reasonably well educated, relatively cheap resources who mainly speak English sufficiently well to talk to "customers". Plus for scam purposes, it's obviously easier to evade US and other target country law enforcement by being thousands of miles away and with a local police force that may be unable or unwilling to take action against them.
Apple only wants to use India to sell its stuff, particularly old model goods. It has avoided for longest time to provide Apple service through its own stores. It uses reseller network that is not the same as having own stores and service. Now this is amazing that Apple won't accept returns in India when Apple goods bought via Amazon can be returned in India!
Wasn’t India imposing a rule that foreign companies needed to source 30% of the goods they sell locally to open their own stores? Apple is trying to open stores in select markets in India but 30% is a high bar to meet.
Previously Apple India allowed one to buy extended Apple Care+ within 1 year of buying the device but they changed the duration to 60 days last year. Now I have a Macbook Pro 16" without extended warranty because I had already crossed the 60 day mark when they changed their policy and so they won't let me extend the warranty. This is going to cost me a lot!
Why is it going to cost you a lot? Are you expecting it to break? As long as you take reasonable care and don't drop it into a pool those things are pretty reliable. I've bought 4 macbooks since 2012 and passed them on to family whenever I wanted a new one and they are all still working despite the occasional bump.
You can't take nothing for granted. My mac mini started having issues just before end of warranty. Now after the end of warranty to fix it would cost me about 1/2 its original price. My pro which is out of warranty also has issues again fixing would cost me the same as buying a new pc laptop. Apple devices are very good when they are under warranty at least in India.
I think this policy change is global—or at any rate, it applies in the UK as well. Disappointing, because previously I would buy second-hand but less-than-year-old Apple products specifically so I could purchase the extended AppleCare warranty on them. A great way to get a recent machine at a decent discount.
This isn't surprising, its just consumer culture in other countries. I remember buying computer components in Taiwan, and having the merchant open the box and testing it in front of me as there were refunds and to prove I wasn't getting a fake product.
I was at the Pike Place Market Starbucks in Seattle and picked up a mug special to that shop for my (native Italian) wife. I took it home in DC and found it had a hairline fracture. No problem, I told her, and promptly called the Pike Place Market Starbucks and explained the situation. They immediately mailed me a new one at no cost and apologized.
She remarked that this would NEVER have happened in Italy: no shop would ship something like that, as it would be ripe for abuse. And she's right, there is a big difference in the culture of trust which makes such a thing possible in the USA.
Games Workshop, the miniature manufacturer is like this. The few times I've had an issue with something from them -- mostly missing pieces -- they've shipped me a replacement entire kit, usually overnight at no cost to me.
I have to say Games Workshop and Starbucks are two easy examples, and say nothing about the underlying system of trust in a country.
Games Workshop: a piece costs near nothing to them. It's just a piece of plastic. Makes a ton of economic sense to just replace it and keep customers coming back to buy more profitable plastic.
Starbucks: are a huge multinational that operate a sophisticated logistics network so shipping an item out is less than a thousandth of a rounding error in their daily P&L both in terms of money and time.
The real places to call out / praise are small independent shops where a single item purchased (or returned) could swing the daily revenue / profit one way or another.
While we are discussing service, I have fond memories of IBM's service for Thinkpad. I moved from US to India. Before I left, I had sent a Thinkpad for repair. They told me a repair vendor (Selectron I think) needs a replacement motherboard from Japan (no idea why so!). They promised it will be sent to India to me. I doubted that. They not only shipped it to India but also paid customs duty as Indian customs won't accept it as repair but levied duty as a new laptop!
Really miss the great IBM service.
Can anyone tell me if this is due to cultural differences where abusing a refund policy is common place and accepted, so having something that is generally intended as a "good faith" policy simply doesn't work?
Or is this that there are small groups of very organized individuals abusing it and ruining it for the rest of the country?
I don't think anyone getting such returns/refunds approved is getting accolades by their family members or friends. Usually such people don't tell anyone about it and if they are smart better they keep quite.
So it's not about culture, just that it's worth it here in India because most people aren't making $30 an hour here so lot of pitty scam schemes are profitable for them.
Those who do bad things can always justify to themselves "everyone is doing it" even if the only evidence they've is a newspaper report of a person doing it in their country. I personally frequently manage accounts of my family members including my Dad's and girlfriends account, they aren't doing it infact my dad has kept a lot of crappy things he received because he didn't have time to return and he's a busy banker, his time value is more than all these products etc...very few people in the country actually get paid enough to make these tactics not worth it for them, but a lot of people are god fearing and honest even if they are poor.
This is sorta the concern I would see. In situations where people can justify the action in a Robin Hood style method, it can lead to general acceptance of it, even if it is somewhat looked down upon. I know I've been exposed to that in the tech environment with regards to piracy and such.
I am an Indian. I can attest that a lot indians are extremely corrupt and will abuse the system as as possible for their own benefit. I am so ashamed of being an indian. Indians are the people who don’t put the shopping cart back in its place and just leave it in the parking lot and the rest of the people can’t park their cars. They unload the cart into car and don’t bother that traffic is backing up.
As a non-Indian, my impression (after hearing something like that multiple times about Indians) is that people in India may be raised to be more apt to over-use a system (and even abuse it), but it's not unique to them. Every country has people who do it far too much, and everyone does it to some extent.
So don't feel so bad.
Also, these kinds of things are usually a trade off. Your culture has a lot of beautiful things that are unique to it, too. No culture is perfect, and pretty much everyone is just trying to get by.
IMO, be the best you that you can be, enjoy the beauty of life, and don't feel responsible for others.
Thank you for the thoughtful answer. I am not unaware of my first impulse towards anger. I have hurt a lot of people with my angry outbursts. Some of them are in their after lives and I hope my sorry reaches them.
I was also drunk when I wrote my original message. I have been drinking since 8 am since my wife left for work. I also need to get my drinking problem in order.
There are self-centered people from all countries.
I used to feel good/bad depending on what people from my country/region/group etc. do. But it's so silly. Why do I care what another person does - whom I don't even know? It's the same with long lost ancestors.
So now a days I notice such thoughts quickly and remember that it's a silly heuristic that my brain uses and I should ignore it.
Thank you for the thoughtful answer. I am not unaware of my first impulse towards anger. I have hurt a lot of people with my angry outbursts. Some of them are in their after lives and I hope my sorry reaches them.
Don't dwell on guilt, just focus on doing better. It sounds like you already are, because your comment here makes it seem like you are thinking and living the humble life now.
If it’s of any comfort, there are people who specialize in this in the United States as well. Retailers that still offers “receiptless returns” now requires a photo ID so that they can ensure you aren’t playing fraud games with them, and some will openly deny returns to certain customers if shadowy reputation services that no one knows exist deem it too high risk.
Please don't be ashamed of your ethnicity/race/geography. You are an individual and ought to be treated by yourself and others as such. All groups have their cultural and historical baggage. I say this as someone who had quite a bad experience on work trips to India haha.
It is privilege to goto online forums and say such misrepresenting generalized statement and do a virtue signal of being sorry for it. what you are apologizing for ? not all Indians do. it is not a cultural thing. ppl with disadvantaged economic background sometimes do that and there are policies to counter that. the amount of berating on self culture ks appalling
> I am so ashamed of being an indian. Indians are the people who don’t put the shopping cart back in its place and just leave it in the parking lot and the rest of the people can’t park their cars.
I am not sure how misuse of Apple services is related to people leaving carts in the parking lots. Yes, these are civic sense issues but a) how common do you find designated places for carts in the parking? Hell, how many times do you even find a parking b) It takes time for people to adopt something new. 95% of Indian are still shopping in local Kirana shops and placing the stuff directly in cotton or re-cycled plastic bags.
Generally, civic sense is proportionate to resource per capita. While you are in the USA, pls observe this behaviour on black friday sales.
You can't post slurs like that to HN, even if you're a member of the group and intending it as self-criticism. Internet threads don't provide nearly enough information for people to distinguish such nuances. In a medium like this one, it's just flamebait.
A friend of mine from India and I were walking into a Barnes and Noble store. He stops outside the door points to the "for sale book cart" that sits outside the store and tells me if this store was in India, not only the books will be gone but the cart too. The stunning thing he tells me is its not the poor who steal but the customers who would come to the store to buy.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadWith cars it is slightly different most states have something called a "lemon law." If there are more than three repair attempts in the first 6 months for the same issue and the problem is still not fixed then the manufacturer must offer a full refund.
I still think you should take up Apple’s offer to have it repaired/replaced. I guess that’s your only recourse.
It depends on the circumstances, but in the UK and most of Europe, consumer rights are much stronger than in some other parts of the world.
Here in the UK, the basic rule is that the vendor who sold a product to a private individual is on the hook for anything that goes wrong -- that is, they can't just pass the buck to a manufacturer under warranty or some other fall guy, they have to deal with the problem or be held responsible. Whether the vendor can in turn recover any losses from the manufacturer or reseller who supplied them is then that vendor's problem, not the end customer's.
Usually if a product is defective, the next step will be to repair, replace or refund. The legal position tends to be based on both sides being reasonable. For example, if you have a product that fails earlier than you might reasonably expect but still after a couple of years of use, you might get a refund for part of the original purchase price but you probably wouldn't be entitled to all of it. On the other hand, if a product fails in the first few months and the vendor can't repair or replace it, you're probably entitled to a full refund and there is a presumption that the product was defective unless the vendor can prove otherwise. In some cases, rights to a partial refund might last as long as 6 years, if the product purchased might reasonably be expected to last that long but that one didn't.
Several other shenanigans that vendors try to pull elsewhere also don't hold up here. You can't rely on dubious arbitration terms in sale contracts to override statutory consumer rights. A vendor also must not mislead consumers over their rights, for example putting up a sign saying "no refunds" when the buyer might have a legal right to a refund for a defective product. In fact, it's actually illegal for merchants to mislead in that kind of way, which is why you'll see often notices up at the tills that say something like "your statutory rights are not affected" to make it clear that they're not trying to illegally misrepresent anything about those rights.
This is all in addition to any more generous policy a merchant might voluntarily offer or any warranty a manufacturer might offer on its products regardless of where someone buys them.
Even in Sweden, consumer law paradise, I’m pretty sure you can’t ask for your money back.
Most countries also have laws to give consumers a time period where they can return whatever they bought, no questions asked (as long as the product is in good condition)
So the product was not, in fact, in good condition when he wanted to return it.
If I sell you a TV, pretending that it was working perfectly when I know for a fact that there's a component in it that has 90% chances of blowing up in the next month, you'd be perfectly right to complain and expect me to pay you back your money after your TV exploded.
What OP must clarify though is that apples authorised resellers in India do actually perform a good job of replacing defective goods under warranty, which makes getting extended care for apple products in India of paramount importance. Outside of warranty you are so screwed!
That's why I am very hesitant to use it for mass manufactured goods.
ME misses 1 defect showing few months later, and you get n hundred thousand units recall, or worse, the client asking the money back. For a CM it's a complete devastation.
Machining is also very uneconomical unless you can contract high volume machining specialist, but that's impossible for most <1m runs.
Only the biggest PC makers like Asus, and Acer can afford custom casting, and press forging at economical scales, but even they don't go for aluminium everywhere. ASUS for example went with stamped steel shells for some economy models.
When you end up with a part that needs a lot of steps and removes a lot of material you need a machine that is more complicated, more expensive and with a lower throughput than a machine that simply stamps parts out of a sheet, or shapes them through a mandrill.
Casting is a whole other deal, you end up with different properties because the way you cast has different requirements than creating the raw stock. If the part or product you want to make can't match with the results of a cast part (more than just surface finish) you simply can't use casting (until some sort or alloy is found that delivers the required properties).
You can obviously use other methods, i.e. metal injection, or sintering, or you could simply make it out of plastic. Or you make multiple simpler parts and interface them together (screws, glue, welds etc). But all of those are fine from the construction perspective, but not fine from the aesthetic perspective, and those are valid requirements as well.
The manufacturing method generally is selected during a 'design for manufacture' phase, and that phase only comes after you have already established some parameters on the look, feel, and other properties of the product.
If you could just make it out of concrete or a single injected piece of plastic and still meet all the requirements, they would probably do just that (as the process is simpler, cheaper, higher volume etc).
Fatigue, and failure modes are unpredictable for a lot of alloys.
Machinability, and masleability is usually going in reverse to strength.
Tempering, and annealing to counter the above add to cycle time, and cost.
Some aluminium alloys cold flow.
Aluminium is generally excellent for corrosion resistance against anything you have in your household, but sometimes it isn't.
You can't weld it.
Few things can stick to it.
It's thermal expansion is much bigger than glass, and steel.
Not sure why people buy Apple...
Um ... When I buy for myself I look for open box products all the time. Steep discounts (sometimes 25% or more) are awesome for something that is essentially new. I don't give a shit about the unboxing experience unless it's a gift for someone else.
In most situations, however, things are simply repackaged and sold as new. Clothing, for example, is commonly returned; then hopefully re-washed before selling again as new. In most situations this applies to electronics as well, although electronics can be different. There are stories out there of people buying new SD cards that had photos on them. Most companies have a return center that processes returns, inspects them, resets them, and repackages them to be sold again as new.
Exceptions are when returns are sent to stores… like Amazon or Best Buy handle returns differently than returns going back to the manufacturer.
I'm curious, I don't know, but in my experience buying Apple products in several countries, they offer the legal minimum nicely, without resistance (which is already better than many corporations), but generally not more than that.
If the legal after-sales minimum is nothing, then that's what I'd expect Apple to offer.
American Express, Visa, and Mastercard all have some kind of requirement that the merchant allows returns (usually 14 days minimum). Otherwise the consumer can file a chargeback and the resolution will go to the consumer in most situations.
If the majority of returns are good faith, just swallow them and keep everything moving smoothly with happy customers.
If you have a critical mass of customers who disregard right vs. wrong and just see a mark to be exploited, you're pretty much forced to behave adversarially, and everyone loses.
I worked at a startup catering to Indian consumers. It was a typical transactional product coupled with offers. The time and energy we spent on fighting different kinds of abuse was outright insane. The fraudsters would come up with a new trick each week to abuse offers. No matter what check we placed (based on e-mail, phone number, IP etc., etc.,) they would beat it.
Based on my experience I can think of a few contributing factors.
1. Indian population. Lot of businesses underestimate this. They are used to reason in terms of %. But when you have a population of 1300 the % could still be within a threshold but absolute number would be larger than entire nations.
2. Outright incompetent cyber policing. The Indian consumers getting access to cheaper smartphone and internet exploded in the 2nd half of last decade. Naturally the country's police have just been unable to scale up to deal with new age crimes.
3. Poverty. It's super lucrative for young poor people to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities and abuse goodwill policies. The return policy is a good example. E-commerce companies in India are riddled with fraudulent return of goods. The modus operandi is simple enough. Order a smart phone, return a faulty/old one of the same model, sell the new one. Profit.
4. Extreme levels of corruption and vast geography. There are some well known cybercrime hotspot PIN codes but chasing the fraudsters is mostly futile. The police are mostly lethargic and more often than not are happy to work with the criminals to collect a weekly payment. It's more lucrative that way, why kill the golden goose?
5. Cheap internet, cheaper SIM connection. The country is awash with cheap bandwidth and SIM connection. To an extent you'll find new SIM packets lying on the sidewalk. This makes it extremely hard to tackle online frauds.
Don't sellers there record the serial number of phones? I thought it was routine everywhere.
If the serial number is recorded for the transaction then they can't just send back any other phone with a different serial number.
Which of course you can’t be bothered to link?
[0] https://www.apple.com/hk/shop/help/exchange_return
They also raised the price of latest iPhone by $100 since iPhone 5 because of China reselling. So if you exclude VAT or Import TAX, ( which HK doesn't have ), It would be the most expensive iPhone with the least amount of services.
Mac and others products are normal though.
So no global warranty, but also no global repair or replacement of parts with official parts even when you are willing to pay for it.
There isn't much arbitrage for new Apple products: if anything, iPhones are more expensive in other countries, especially LEDC countries due to import tariffs (e.g. Brazil and India) and VAT.
That said, I can understand phone companies, in general, not having worldwide warranties because localized phones will have different radio hardware (well, prior to LTE...).
-----
I just found Apple's current warranty doc for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod and it does mention international coverage ( https://www.apple.com/legal/warranty/products/ios-warranty-d... ). It would be bad PR for Apple if tourists and businesspeople in foreign countries couldn't get their phones repaired on holiday or during a critical business trip.
[1] I was in the Philippines and I was getting off a boat in shallow sea water. My phone was in the bottom pocket of my beach shorts, and I walked through the sea water for maybe two to three metres distance up to waist height depth. This should have been ok for the depth I went.
Their suspicion was that the outer seal had failed (even though it had always been in a case).
You were lucky and got it replaced under goodwill, as iPhone X has an IP67 rating[1] and specific about sea/salt water damage -- the kind you have described. Back home, you would have had to deal with a lot of grief[2].
[1] https://www.iphonehacks.com/2018/04/iphone-x-ip-67-water-res...
[2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204104
I think I was definitely lucky yeah!
They charged me $500 to replace the defective keyboard in the Mac Pro 2-3years back within 3 months of purchase and said I put glue on the key which came off.
I have a friend for whose new iphone 10 pro they refused to replace despite servicing the screen thrice and it clearly was manufacturing problem ( they agree) but will not replace the phone only the screen. He spent hours on the phone and no escalation he could do to get them to do it.
Every time i see in Europe or US, the service levels are starkly different, I have got replacement devices in minutes ,it is so bad in India that I and many people I know get their idevices serviced when we vist stateside.
The "licensed" apple provider said the would need to change a whole lot of parts to replace the keyboard.
I went to an "unlicensed " workshop and they only charged the price of the keyboard and 500 pesos for the work. A++
I hear they'll still honor it in some obvious cases...
Even Costco has drastically scaled back the return policy on electronics for that reason. In large enough groups, people suck.
Our store was one of the busiest in the US for a single store. One guy ... just one guy abused it regularly. Beyond him almost nobody ever took advantage of the offer at all... Easy enough for the store manager to tell that guy to knock it off and there ya go.
What I assumed was a crazy / unwise policy, effectively cost them nothing, hardly was ever used, didn't require any new processes at all, and amounted to just a advertising slogan.
I was surprised and impressed.
A better manager would figure out how to keep him as a paying customer...
As a european, it's amusing to hear you say that as the majority of European countries have far, far more stringent consumer-protection regs than the US, such as mandatory 2 year warranties, distance-selling laws, legal rights to a refund or replacement, and so on. Apple's 90 day warranty is a joke when you can buy the same product, for almost the same price after factoring-in VAT, with a 2 year warranty only a 5 hour flight away...
And in general, the responsibility for the goods is always with the seller first, manufacturer second. If your laptop breaks and the seller says "oh the manufacturer declined warranty" then sorry, tough luck, it's the seller who has to repair/replace it now.
Almost. It does not apply to custom-made products. Apple resellers consider BTO models to be custom-made and thus not eligible for this protection. But at least they warn you upfront.
I thought the only get-out for Apple was personalized items, namely those with laser-engraving. BTO/JIT orders where you choose from a narrow set of options (e.g. RAM size, HDD size, etc) in Apple's case probably wouldn't be BTO because they tend to pre-assemble a modest stockpile of all of the different BTO configs.
Lower-volume products, like the $6000 Mac Pro might have a case, but it's not like a returned (but new, even unopened) MacPro isn't resalable...
Whether you pay for extra protections via higher prices automatically (EU) or as an a la carte add-on (US) is irrelevant. On a risk adjusted basis, the cost is the same.
The EU simply cuts off the consumer's ability to take more risk for lower cost. They force you to buy the warranty every time.
>>On a risk adjusted basis, the cost is the same.
I'd love to see how you came to that conclusion. In EU the seller is always responsible for 2 years after sale for the product, in the US a 2 year warranty will be few hundred dollars on laptops and other expensive items. The difference is definitely not the same.
I highly doubt you're doing true absolute calculations factoring in all the supply chain, macroeconomic, and tax considerations.
The reason you can't easily compare this at a glance is complicated by currency fluctuations, shipping costs, labor costs, embedded VAT in prices vs. taxes added at purchase, VAT rebates, differences in EU warranty law vs. purchased warranties in the US, "discount" marketing tactics of American retailers vs. European retailers, everyday low prices vs. seasonal discounting, etc.
Trust me when I say you're not enjoying some free lunch at the expense of corporate earnings by living in the EU. You're simply restricting consumer and entrepreneur choices, by preemptively deciding what the consumer needs.
Which can be good or bad depending on the item in question. Computer hardware? Not sure we need the nanny state involved, there's healthy competition and you run the risk of stifling new business models from arising (it's no secret that Europe isn't exactly a hotbed of tech innovation). Healthcare? Now that's a different story.
Those papers sound interesting. Can you recommend any?
>it's no secret that Europe isn't exactly a hotbed of tech innovation
When you mean innovation, do you refer to Xerox and Bell Labs? Or to Microsoft and Apple? Cause europe has a lot of the first kind, not much of the second kind. And even when they do, they might end being sold out. Like Nokia and Skype.
I mean, I do see your point. But we as a society have decided that sellers should be responsible for a minimum of 2 years for any items they sell. That's just what we (society) require from anyone willing to run a business. We also require them not to dump toxic waste into rivers, and pay their taxes - all enterpreneurs the world over have certain obligations to the state, US just placed the bar lower than elsewhere. I don't mean to say which approach is "right", but I do mean to say that as a consumer I like having greater protections in the EU, even if "perhaps" it means the products bought here cost more.
You are right that it is not a free lunch it’s just a difference in the margin.
You could also argue that two year warranties in the us are priced obscenely (like drugs).
Now Apple doesn't do it. They push you to buy a new product whenever possible along with AppleCare+. Apple Retail employees dont run on commission in US ( Not sure if that is still the case). I remember someone said Apple Retail Italy runs on commission basis. I also know Apple Retail employees also has KPI based on AppleCare+ they sold in the past few years.
Yes.... the whole Apple Retail experience is going against how Steve Job originally envisioning it. For Tim Cook, it is nothing more than a cost center on balance sheet.
Uh, not at all.
Converted to USD and without tax below. Apple products are 11-16% more expensive in Europe
iPhone 12: US price $699 - Europe price without VAT $807
iPhone 12 Pro Max: US price $1099 - Europe price without VAT $1256
iPad Air: US price $599 - Europe price without VAT $667
Macbook Air: US price $999 - Europe price without VAT $1126
For example Apple in the US let me return a first gen 12.9” iPad Pro after about 4 months and exchange it for the 9.7” version the week it came out.
I would have expected a flat out no from retailers in Europe.
Please. American consumer protection is almost non-existent, especially when compared with places like the EU.
Same goes for the country's biggest online retailers, both Amazon and Flipkart also switched to a replacement-only policy in India.
"Most analysts agree that many many buyers were abusing the company's refund policy. With many buying latest smartphones, and returning them after a week after trying them "[1]
I've seen return abuse in the US, not sure if it's higher than what I have seen in India. I tried to research this topic back in high school for a paper, it was hard to find concrete data to compare the two countries.
[1]https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech-news/amazon-ends-re...
[†] edit: I feel like I need to clarify what "abusing" really was.
AppleCare+ used to cover two incidents of Theft, Loss and accidents.
Third party resellers essentially activated an iphone and marked it as lost. Then, after getting a new replacement iPhone from Apple, they would go on and sell it to customers.
Nowadays, you can only get AppleCare (not the plus) in India which does not cover theft or accidental damage.
You pay for Apple products because it's impractical and hard to use. It shows the world you are part of the group.
>>You pay for Apple products because it's impractical and hard to use
Exactly, that's why developers who charge big money for their time use them - because they are impractical and hard to use. You cracked it mate.
On the other hand, In the US, more often than not, you have to pack up your item and drop it off to a store to return it.
This model would work great to bring more developing countries on board with e-commerce
It's interesting how these clothing retailers still offer a very customer friendly return policy compared to electronics retailers like Amazon or Apple.
If you had a Star Trek replicator in your home that could replicate a brand new iPhone for you for free that lasts a week then poofs out of existence, you'd go ahead and use it, probably more than once.
If you don't mind the hassle and the ethical, er, annoyance of going to a store, waiting in queues, having $1000+ temporarily blocked off from your savings, a bunch of back and forth with the sales people, etc, then that's equivalent to replicating yourself an iPhone for a week for free.
No, he mostly got paid ₹3-₹4k per night. Purchasing power of rural India is very low.
Many people also abuse return policies to buy expensive cameras, use them to shoot nice pictures on vacation and then sending them back. They can still keep the pictures, so the camera lost its value for them.
This is also why the terms on rental cars can get very specific.
Now that I think of it, the "eat the steak then complain" tactic is probably the most common that's in this ballpark.
Personally, I do judge the people I've seen do this. They are self-centered and all did it for social reasons. If someone did it for a job interview I might understand, but invariably it was to have something they didn't want to pay for.
With bulletproof insurance and the right accessories.
Indian culture is about display of wealth. Wealthy individuals are respected and get access to inner clubs while the people who don't have much don't get invited anywhere.
College students might want to leave a good impression at a party and might get an iPhone so people start taking them seriously.
Similarly, a guy might get an iPhone so his date considers him important.
iPhone is status symbol in India because not everyone can afford it.
I can certainly and easily afford it but I am still using android because I don't feel the need of uncessarry attention
Every culture
Apple is at the centre of this. You see people who obviously can't afford it with those (probably) fake AirPods all over the place. Sometimes they're not even connected. It's THE "look at me, I can afford it" electronics brand display for the middle and lower class.
My friend Kevin used to test out different GPUs when he was writing a game engine. He'd buy one, install it on his computer, run the engine, then return it a few days later. They often had a 10% restocking fee. Was he abusing policy?
It's the same sort of logic banks use to justify "identity theft." Ah yes, it's the fault of the customer, not the banks' poor verification methods.
That said, it's true that when large amounts of people do a thing, you'll have to adjust policy. But it's not their fault for taking advantage of policies they're legally allowed to use, and that the company freely offers.
This is clearly unethical, but maybe not illegal.
The fact that businesses change their policies as a result of abuse should tell you whether these actions are within the spirit of what they intended or whether it's outside of it.
It's not illegal to use the agreement in this way, and I would never try to make it so. But I would absolutely look down on someone for behaving this way.
Culturally in the states and Latin America that makes you jerk and people will hate you for it. So there is social pressure in place to help regulate those events, but it may not always be the case everywhere.
There's the "letter of the policy" interpretation, where anything the text of the policy doesn't explicitly forbid is A-Okay. And then there's the "socially acceptable norms" interpretation, where you're only supposed to ask for refunds when a product is actually defective, and if you go any further than that, society and HN comments will shame you for it.
In the US, we have a thriving culture of shaming people for anything and everything, so companies can have generous policies and lean on the social norms interpretation to keep people in check. India is more of a free-for-all, so companies feel the need to spell everything out.
Consumers in US can buy a product without the anxiety of not having read the fine print, knowing that the seller will honor the return policy. Sellers also end up selling more because most buyers like the product they buy. Society wins overall.
I have lived both in India and US, about two decades each at both places.
We can agree to disagree, but it's not X just because someone says it is.
>If you buy a product with the intent to return it for refund, that's abuse.
I think the issue is people operating in bad faith. I recall a story about people buying big TVs before the super bowl then returning them the next week. My opinion is that's abusing a company's generous return policy. The people doing that never intended to buy. The company had the policy to give customers more confidence in their purchases, not to run a free TV rental business.
There's a saying "this is why we can't have nice things". If people constantly push leniency or generosity to the limits, they get taken away, and it's a net loss to everybody else.
I counter with the following observation: You note that a return policy exists so that customers can use it. Under what conditions are you allowed to use it and it not be abuse?
Being able to return the product is often why customers buy something. How many times have you considered the return policy before buying? You can decide to return it for any reason you like: whether you dislike the product, whether you ran out of money and needed a refund, or for no reason at all.
If it's a problem, the business will change the policy, just as Apple did here.
If your plan wasn't to return it from the start, then it isn't abuse. This seems pretty simple. In your original example your "friend" was planning on using GPUs to test and then return them. At no point was he planning on keeping this purchase.
Now, I will say if you're friend bought 3 GPU's with the plan to keep one and returned two I would say that's not abuse, but there are certainly better ways to try before you buy.
I'm not sure whether there's an ethical problem with acting in that way, but it resembles a "tragedy of the commons" situation. Or, "this is why we can't have nice things".
I'll give you an example, which is also a true story: I bought a 4K TV that could also run Android apps. But, while regular TV broadcasts displayed in 4K, the Android apps were limited to HD. This, of course were never mentioned in any of their marketing material. Did return, and did get a refund, but if it had worked as I thought it did, I would have kept it.
You claim it's okay to follow the letter of the policy and abuse it. When too many people do that the policy is removed.
Result: You live in a culture where returns are disallowed.
Me, I'd prefer to live in a culture where returns are allowed. That only happens when people don't abuse the return policy. The fact that Apple changed their policy because people abused it is a loss for everyone that had no intention of abusing it. It's even a loss for those who were abusing it if they ever have a legit reason to want to return something.
There are a many many policies that only really work on social norms. Living in a society that respects those norms is "almost" always a nicer society to live in.
There is the spirit and the letter of an agreement. The relative importance of these in commercial contexts varies from culture to culture. (The term of art is high trust versus low trust societies.) Abuse (versus breach) involves complying with the letter of an agreement while violating its spirit. As you observe, this is subjective.
Fundamentally, if return policies are treated by customers as a return versus rental, terms can be more generous. If they are abused, the terms must be stricter.
I don't know if that rises to definition of abuse, but that's why I don't want people to use refunds that way.
Yes, it is abuse.
If you are an honest seller, you can't even resell returned products as brand new.
Yes. Here, abuse means misuse, which must be interpreted relative to the intent of the ones making the policy (or else it's meaningless). The intent is clear: for customers to be able to return the item if they are not satisfied. It is not a borrow/rental policy.
Remember Costco permanently blocked some consumers due to abusing the return policy? Costco honors the policy, but those consumers were still considered as abusing the policy.
Let me ask you this. Do you agree with illegal copyright infringement being classified as "piracy"? My issue here is the terminology. It's deceptive to classify this behavior as "abuse," as if someone was kicking a puppy.
It's an asshole thing to do, but it's not abuse. No one is doing anything illegal, and everyone is free to feel however they wish about their morals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_fraud
This is the problem when people go around pretending like they are technically correct, when they aren't.
Everyone else, intuitively understood the problem with return abuse, except for you. Which is why you got this wrong.
If you had focused less on trying to find some clever hack or technically, then you wouldn't have been so misinformed on this issue.
Not one of those examples is "the act of purchasing an item with the intent to return it."
Also, be less aggressive. We're having a conversation here. It's not a battle.
The entry you're looking for is Wardrobing, and it's most certainly not illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardrobing
The Talk page even has someone asking the very same question I am: Why is it fraud? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wardrobing
It's not fraud. It's not "abuse," and it's not illegal. You're free to feel however you wish about it.
Yes it is. You are wrong.
https://www.news24.com/w24/Style/Fashion/Trends/wardrobing-e...
From the article:
"as it is an act that can, in fact, be prosecute"
https://www.spatzlawfirm.com/blog/2019/08/what-is-return-fra...
"Purchasing an item and using it for a short period of time before returning (also known as wardrobing or “free renting”)"
Its illegal. Thats what the sources say. The 2nd link is from a law firm. Your facts are wrong.
> https://www.findlaw.com/consumer/consumer-transactions/retur...
"Below are some common types of return fraud:
Wardrobing (or "renting"): Buying clothes or other items for one-time use and then returning them"
" For example, wardrobing may be next to impossible to prove"
https://www.allcriminaldefense.law/what-is-criminal-return-f...
"People that engage in ‘wardrobing’ or ‘free renting,’ are also committing return fraud."
https://www.legalline.ca/legal-answers/fraud-against-retaile...
" Return fraud
Renting or Wardrobing: When someone buys an item specifically on a short-term basis with the intent to return it, this is known as renting or wardrobing. An example is buying a dress for a special occasion and returning it after it has been worn."
https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/credit-cards/worn...
"Wardrobing might sound like an innocent thing to do—after all, many of us have returned something we've already worn at least once in our lives. But the truth is that wardrobing is actually considered "return fraud."
"It's technically illegal""
- In a recent Florida case , a Miami socialite, Meghana Rajadhyaksha, was found guilty for purchasing over $130k in designer purses from retail giant TJ MAXX and also purchasing similar knock-offs from Amazon where she swapped the designer tags out and returned the Amazon knock-offs to TJ MAXX to receive a full refund.
I agree this is fraud! That's literally deceiving in order to receive money. There's nothing deceptive about using a policy that the store offers.
- The Florida statutes define return fraud as obtaining or using a receipt in a fraudulent manner
Ditto.
You're free to keep repeating that I have no idea what I'm talking about and so on, but at this point it's becoming quite boring for readers, and everything has been said. We simply agree to disagree, and that's that.
Now, please stop calling me a criminal. It's not nice, and it's also not accurate.
If you dig up a single case of someone being prosecuted for using a policy that the store offers, without modifying the receipt or the item, let me know.
Read them again.
There are multiple sources, that I quoted, that literally say that it is illegal. They use the words illegal to describe wardrobing.
> Now, please stop calling me a criminal.
Well the sources say that you are a criminal.
One specifically said "It's technically illegal"
> We simply agree to disagree,
No. The lawyers say that you are wrong. The actual legal websites say that you are a criminal. They literally call it illegal.
Here was another quote "People that engage in ‘wardrobing’ or ‘free renting,’ are also committing return fraud."
Return fraud, in this quote, is referencing the Florida law.
Although wardrobing is, arguably, unethical, there are no statutes or case law that specifically render it illegal. Whether wardrobing should even be considered an abuse of retail policies would depend on the retailers’ specific return policies. Some retailers welcome returns of clothing in any condition, therefore, one can hardly argue that the return of any item, in any condition is an abuse of that policy.
We can sit here and cite sources all day at each other, or you can find a case of someone being prosecuted for wardrobing. Once you do, I would be more than happy to listen and to change my mind on the issue.
In case it helps, I currently live in Seattle, and the story I related in my original comment happened in Boston, I believe. I'm also about to be moving back to Missouri. (You seem to be focusing on Florida for some reason, so I thought I'd give you a few trails to follow.)
So you don't care about what actual legal firms say?
I am giving you links to actual law firms!
You can't just say "well these 7 legal experts are wrong" and expect to be taken seriously.
> We can sit here and cite sources
Wtf dude. Sources and the legal experts and lawyers know more about this than you do.
If a bunch of law firms say that it is illegal, then clearly it is illegal in some places.
So, that means that we can call it fraud, because it is illegal is some places.
(Once more, I gave you information about (a) where I live, and therefore where the relevant laws are, and (b) pointed out that there are many, many citations saying that Wardrobing is an asshole move (as I said) but not illegal. That is my basis for rejecting your claims. It's not impossible to search the case law for someone being prosecuted for Wardrobing, and I encourage you to do so; if you find someone who has been convicted under any state law, I would be genuinely interested in hearing about it, since that would likely change my mind. Irrelevant sources, however, won't.)
But something like this would not work in Bolivia (where I'm from), people would abuse the shit out of it. within a week the policy would be gone, no doubt.
Add to that the people who realize what a waste of an investment that was after the holiday spree is over, you can explain it a bit more.
But of course, it's impossible to tell surely without data.
Going back to gut feelings: Does he see suspicious behavior? Weird reasons for returning?
A couple random things - the first stack of shelves that face the front of the store are managed to give a good impression. They always keep those shelves full of pallets and try to have a lot of only a few items to give a clean look. If the warehouse has empty space they try to keep it so you can't see from the center of the store.
It's gonna be impossible to concretely discern intent from the data you could get, but it's pretty obvious there's _some_ abuse. The only question is where you draw the line on abuse and how much.
January at our store was a rush of returns of opened and used Christmas decorations because "I decided I don't want it anymore." Often times from people that had done the same thing year after year. We'll never know what those people really intended when they bought it in the fall, but you'd have to be pretty damn charitable to assume the best of intent in all the cases. Especially when it was people doing it multiple years in a row.
I assume it's some combination of degraded quality as most stuff is made in the same Asian factories and an increasingly widespread attitude that it's OK to take anything that isn't nailed down.
It's more the depreciation and how quickly electronics evolve. People were using the returns as a free lifetime of upgrades.
One particularly stark example when I worked there a long time ago was someone who wanted to upgrade their old projection TV.
So four years after they bought it they brought it in and returned it. They got about $4k back. They walked out on the floor, picked up a brand new LCD TV for $2k and almost half a decade after their original purchase they walked out with a brand new, upgraded TV and $2k in their pocket.
You can imagine how this can be abused with most electronics that Costco sells. Imagine going in and getting a brand new upgraded laptop every 2-3 years for the rest of your life after a single couple thousand dollar purchase.
I saw someone return a flat of steaks with half a remaining cooked steak left just saying "my guests thought they weren't very good".
Someone had a custom photo book printed and when they came to pick it up decided they didn't want it anymore and just got a refund.
Someone returned a plasma TV because of the glare from their windows.
My wife bought a car seat there (something you can't return _anywhere_) which we ended up not being able to get installed in the car (had the shitty cheap version of the LATCH clips that are impossible to get tightened up). Took it back for a full refund.
We bought a vacuum there that broke literally a week after the manufacturer's warranty. Brought it in and exchanged it for a new one.
There's no time limit on any of this.
This is by no means normal in North America. It's one of those Costco things like providing part time retail workers reasonable salaries and health benefits, etc that sounds insane in theory but obviously works for them.
I know personally there's been a couple times where I've been on the fence about buying something and ended up purchasing it because "If it sucks/falls apart in 6 months/whatever I can just bring it back."
But I mean, those policies exist elsewhere, so I don't know what specifically makes Polish customers more prone to abusing those policies. I suspect it's the relative cost of a phone vs income.
India is basically a "low trust society". People in general have a mindset of "scarcity" and at every stage of their lives they try to micro-optimize for what's the best for them at that time. In the absence of good institutions, this often means that we get stuck in shitty Nash equilibria which have terrible, terrible outcomes for everyone involved, but are difficult to get out of.
It is not that everyone in India has no morals or behaves terribly. But the number of people who do are enough to spoil trust-based models that work in other countries by making them too expensive.
From a business point of view, the obvious question is - how do you create a circle of "trustworthy" people? If you could create such a circle, you could offer them special services (better return policies, lower rates for insurance and credit etc) to encourage them to consume more without worrying so much about abuse. This is one of the most exciting business problems in India and solving it is worth at least worth 10 billion dollars and that is probably an underestimate.
There is one company already that claims to have solving this problem as their primary long-term vision - Cred and that company is currently valued at > $2 billion even though currently their revenues are weak and any connection to the long term trust problem quite distant.
1 - People buying a handful of phones and comparing them, then returning all but the one they decide to keep.
2 - Semi related, one of the ten thousand phone comparison Youtuber channels.
I don't really know what the solution is. I think a phone rental business could spring up. Charge $10/day or something to rent a high end phone to folks to see how they like it.
My guess is that Bestbuy has more money so they can afford the rare demo phone getting stolen somehow. Funnily enough when I worked at Radioshack we often had people steal the fake phones that just played a video loop. Someone even tried to return a fake phone once saying that we sold them a broken device.
Think of it - if you are spending $1200 on an item, would you want to save $20 on it to get one that who knows who had for who knows how long? I sure wouldn't. You'd probably need to go at least $100 lower before it becomes somewhat appealing.
Third party resellers essentially activated an iphone and marked it as lost. Then, after getting a new replacement iPhone from Apple, they would go on and sell it to customers.
Nowadays, you can only get AppleCare (not the plus) in India which does not cover theft or accidental damage.
Maybe Apple could just give a discount if you give up your return option at the point of sale.
Very large fraction of US population is paid $30 an hour compared to Indian population which makes scamming not worth the trouble
I live in India and I've worked in the US I know Indians just have too much time at their hand, so even schemes which take a lot of your time with little payoff are worth it here.
And the reason people don't use their time to achieve something more productive like starting companies etc...is because government procedures are very hard to understand, and you get penalties left and right, even starting a micro industry like machining shop is hard, power is not available continuously even at top industrial zones in India, fixed cost of electricity connection is high in industrial area and government is very insensitive to business owners so only very large and the ones close to policies are able to navigate.
The biggest problem isn't even market in India which has lot of demand, it's the costs you didn't plan for which seem low on surface the deeper you dig, the costs just keep increasing untill you are left with nothing and in debt so starting a business isn't very popular here and people limit the size of their success to not get in trouble.
On Amazon India you can still get refund based on your history with them.
Basically trusted customers still get the "refund" option in their account. Just new customers and the suspecious one aren't given that often by default
Why frame it so negatively? You could as well say "people saw that Apple was ripe for disruption".
That alone is not only OK but was recommended recently in the USA.
Specifically, during COVID the Apple retail shops were shut so you couldn't compare devices when shopping. I bought my GF a regular and max sized iPhone and she took a week to decide which one she wanted. We sent the other one back and had a refund before the credit card bill was even due, so as far as my bank account was concerned I really did only pay for one. In normal times we would have been unlikely to have bothered with this (although with something as personal as a phone...)
I can imagine that this only scales to a certain percentage of transactions though.
I wonder if the same people hold both the opinions.
Apple has gone and done the analog of that; they've changed the returns code.
I don't see anything wrong with what Apple has done here, and if the US decided to tighten up the tax code, I wouldn't see anything wrong with that either.
To your actual point, I think it's about intent and spirit. The holes in the tax code were put there intentionally, to benefit businesses. We may not like it, but that's how it is. Businesses aren't violating the letter or even the spirit of the law when they avail themselves of it.
On the contrary, Apple sets their return policy based on a balance between good customer service and an estimate of how much that customer service will cost them to provide. They likely estimate this cost based on what they think is reasonable customer behavior. In this case they mis-estimated: apparently Indians don't behave within what they consider to be the spirit of that policy.
Another way of looking at it: the US government estimates tax revenue knowing that those loopholes exist, and is fine with the result. There are no budget-related surprises. Apple's estimates for the cost of returns in India was a large underestimation, so they're fixing their problem.
Maybe it's an overreaction to think about this as "returns abuse", but I don't see these two things as being the same.
The result, which is that large corporations have a tax rate lower than small businesses, is what is important. Do you want a company, as it grows bigger and spends more on the legal implications of its business structure, to be able to lower its tax rate? Do you want to incentivize bigger companies to have more tax agility than smaller ones? I don't, and I don't believe any legislator would hold such unpopular views.
It's not like they are paid for that or anything.
Once again, you're being too simplistic.
If you break store policy, they don't send armed people to your house to fix the glitch.
You also seem to be comparing tax minimization (as distinct from tax fraud) with warranty/return fraud.
I suspect there are a lot of business owners on HN. Current, future or past. So it's definitely possible.
It’s abuse because people buy it with the intent to return it. Buying it and then honestly changing your mind is fine, but Amazon probably determined that wasn’t the case here.
Lots of products should have a return window this long or longer.
There are innumerable street smart sayings used even by otherwise educated and well paid folks which just amount to "Benefit by hook or crook and fuck this world".
She remarked that this would NEVER have happened in Italy: no shop would ship something like that, as it would be ripe for abuse. And she's right, there is a big difference in the culture of trust which makes such a thing possible in the USA.
Games Workshop: a piece costs near nothing to them. It's just a piece of plastic. Makes a ton of economic sense to just replace it and keep customers coming back to buy more profitable plastic.
Starbucks: are a huge multinational that operate a sophisticated logistics network so shipping an item out is less than a thousandth of a rounding error in their daily P&L both in terms of money and time.
The real places to call out / praise are small independent shops where a single item purchased (or returned) could swing the daily revenue / profit one way or another.
Or is this that there are small groups of very organized individuals abusing it and ruining it for the rest of the country?
So it's not about culture, just that it's worth it here in India because most people aren't making $30 an hour here so lot of pitty scam schemes are profitable for them.
The first application that they mentioned was preventing insurance fraud in India...
So don't feel so bad.
Also, these kinds of things are usually a trade off. Your culture has a lot of beautiful things that are unique to it, too. No culture is perfect, and pretty much everyone is just trying to get by.
IMO, be the best you that you can be, enjoy the beauty of life, and don't feel responsible for others.
I was also drunk when I wrote my original message. I have been drinking since 8 am since my wife left for work. I also need to get my drinking problem in order.
That's why I asked but I think you're rage is legit as this is the sad relatiy of society right now.
I used to feel good/bad depending on what people from my country/region/group etc. do. But it's so silly. Why do I care what another person does - whom I don't even know? It's the same with long lost ancestors.
So now a days I notice such thoughts quickly and remember that it's a silly heuristic that my brain uses and I should ignore it.
As a result, I think my moral compass is quite a bit stricter than most people. I definitely have people telling me I'm being too hard on myself.
But I don't turn that compass on others. They have to make their own choices, and live with the consequences, both internal and external.
I am not sure how misuse of Apple services is related to people leaving carts in the parking lots. Yes, these are civic sense issues but a) how common do you find designated places for carts in the parking? Hell, how many times do you even find a parking b) It takes time for people to adopt something new. 95% of Indian are still shopping in local Kirana shops and placing the stuff directly in cotton or re-cycled plastic bags.
Generally, civic sense is proportionate to resource per capita. While you are in the USA, pls observe this behaviour on black friday sales.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html