Nuance, you always post such interesting articles! I’m happy to see, towards the end of the Atlantic article, that retailers are making progress in dealing with returns. From earlier in the article, Joel Rampoldt, a managing director at the consulting firm AlixPartners, told me that most people in the industry believe that about 25 percent of returns are discarded, although the proportion varies widely depending on the product (clothing tends to be easier to resell than electronics that may contain user data, for example) belies their bold print claim about consumers fooling ourselves to think stuff makes it back to shelves—75%+ isn’t inconsequential. It’s great to reduce the problem of returns, but I think we need to keep in mind that the alternative to shopping by mail has tons (literally) of environmental problems too.
