this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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Weird News - Things that make you go 'hmmm'
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My understanding is that Amazon doesn't vet their returns and simply take it as a loss. There is a secondary industry where people can buy pallets of returned items, kind of like storage wars.
I wish Amazon would actually return items to stock if the items are in good condition but they chose not to.
Story time.
I bought a Dewalt thickness planer off of Amazon. For those unfamiliar, this is a 90-pound, $700 power tool, you put a board in and it shaves it thinner and maybe also flatter and straighter.
It arrives in its retail box closed with packing tape, pretty typical. I unpack the tool, find a few things the manual instructs you to attach are already attached. I open up the top cover, and there are a few wood chips inside the planer. Huh.
Go to fire the thing up, it turns on, feed in a test board, the infeed roller grabs it, it starts planing, it gets about to the outfeed roller and stops HARD. I still don't know if it was the carriage alignment, or a problem with the outfeed rollers or what, but it WOULD NOT feed a board through. What I had on my hand was a $700 sniping machine.
I call DeWalt first, and they say "Well you can send it to us for repair, it is under warranty, but you will have to pay to ship it and it will be a few weeks. It's probably faster to return it to Amazon in exchange for a new one." Which is ultimately what I did.
The second planer that arrived showed up in a similar retail box that was shrink wrapped. The former was bare cardboard taped shut, remember.
I'm pretty convinced I was shipped a defective returned unit.
They resell returned items as a Warehouse item.
I don't know where to start first to make puns about that. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader.
I've bought some Amazon returns at auction and it was about 50/50 for usable items and completely worthless (broken air fryer with food in it) junk. I've also both things from Amazon that we're obviously returns - torn packaging, parts missing, etc.