Since I currently live in the punishingly hot Miami and am a Ph.D. candidate, most of my time is spent inside, and most of the scenarios I encounter day-to-day are solitary and bookish. As a break from the peer-review grind, I’d like to share a few snippets from a recent New Yorker article. It’s a touch eccentric to review a six-page article, I admit. It’s no novel, but you’d probably call it one if you saw me writing a letter its length. I digress—much as, it happens, many of the merchandise returns in the United States do, which brings me to David Owen’s piece: “There and back again: How product returns became an industry” or, to use the article’s inexplicably different online title, “What happens to all the stuff we return?” In a nutshell: not much good.
With Canada’s worst wildfire season on record looming large, every environmental catastrophe that isn’t (directly) climate change can feel like small potatoes, but I still read about them (and think others should too) because they so often tug on the same root: collective craving for convenience. The optimist in me reasons that if a thousand people read one small-potatoes article, a handful of them might have a solution, and perhaps one will have the resources to put it into action.
I have something of a guilt complex, so it’s not precisely enjoyment that I get from these forays, but something arguably more valuable: chagrined perspective. Despite the fact that my favourite recliner (lovingly dubbed the Dissertation Chair by my mom) and canvas print (pictured) were scooped up from the side of the road, I, too, am a member of the convenience cult. I treat my habitual shower more like a chore than a marvel and “handle” the Miami heat by simply turning up the A/C. I, too, have returned more than my fair share of items (I’m thinking of the apartment’s-worth of Ikea furniture I brought to languish in the “As-Is” section during one of my interminable moves) and was irrationally irked by Antigua’s seemingly whole-island no-returns-under-any-circumstances policy. In reality, I don’t need most of what I buy, and most of my returns are gratuitous.
A few highlights from Owens’ piece (in the spirit of the article, I’m recycling some text)—and my takes:
“People who’ve been invited to fancy parties sometimes buy expensive outfits or accessories, then return them the next day, caviar stains and all—a practice known as ‘wardrobing’” (par. 2). My eye snagged on the new word, which I rather like.
“Home Depot and Lowe’s let you return dead plants, for a year. You just have to be shameless enough to stand in line with the thing you killed” (par. 2). I am cripplingly frugal, and admit I would be shameless enough for this faux pas, if ever I live somewhere long enough to literally put down some roots.
“One and a half percent of US GDP—which would be bigger than the GDP of many countries around the world—is just the stuff that people got for Christmas and said, ‘Nah, do they have blue?’” (par. 3). Here’s the crux of it: Owens’ thesis. An astonishing number of items purchased in this country are sent “back,” except not really, because they aren’t generally sold on as if the original purchaser’s porch was a simple detour. In Owens’ words: “Most online shoppers assume that items they return go back into regular inventory, to be sold again at full price. That rarely happens” (par. 4).
Owens fittingly describes returned merchandise as “the detritus of unfettered consumerism” (par. 6), calling to (my) mind the ocean’s great garbage patches and seagull-crowded landfills—where many returned items find their discomposed resting places.
“Apparel is almost like vegetables… things can lose value quickly” (par. 21): an image that speaks for itself.
Owens describes technicians at a refurbishing outfit as “members of a rapidly vanishing species: people who know how to repair stuff” (par. 36). That’s a species I’d dearly love to see protected. Alas, it’s not to be: Owens’ former repairman is now a Home Depot greeter—“because nowadays when appliances malfunction most people simply buy new ones” (par. 36).
Owens ends with an anecdote that shows, astounding though it seems, just how entrenched the preference for returnability over quality has really become: “I said, ‘let me just theoretically offer you a deal,’ he [Hogan, the CEO of America’s Remanufacturing Company] told me. ‘I’ll sell you a computer for the same price as the one you have now—a nice, expensive computer. But it will be twice as durable, and it will weigh half as much, and its battery will last twice as long, and it will have twice the processing power and twice the memory.’ The only condition, he said, would be that returns would not be allowed, for any reason. ‘This was Georgia Tech’s sustainability center, so these were super-smart engineering hippies,’ he said. ‘There were probably forty or fifty people, all MBAs.’ Hogan assumed that they would all jump at the deal. But no hands went up—not one” (pars. 40-41).
Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth (‘16) is a science communication researcher and practitioner working on her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Natasha hails from Calgary, Alberta. Some of her favo(u)rite authors are C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Bill Bryson. Her favourite earthly place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and her favourite activities are reading and enjoying the great outdoors—preferably simultaneously.
