Confession time: In 2018 I was banned from shopping at ASOS.
It was SUPER embarrassing to be confronted with my buy and return habit (and if you decisive enough NOT to have this habit, this one isn’t for you). I’ve kept this fact a secret for a long time but I feel ready to confess after reading The Cut article that made the round recently.
If you haven’t read it (I highly recommend you do) the premise goes that retails like ASOS and SSENSE are placing lifetime bans on individual shoppers who return at too high of a rate. Initially I was like, phew, so it’s not just me. But then I felt a little embarrassed to be in the company of someone who is wearing, dry cleaning and returning $15,000 worth of goods (this was a stylist who was using lenient returns to build her portfolio, which I have empathy for but also, yikes!).
It was the final paragraph of the article that really got me thinking about how lenient returns affect our shopping mindset.
But knowing you can’t make a return can also be a relief. Nadine Hanson, a server, had long taken advantage of Sephora’s generous return policy. The highly lenient policy afforded her the ability to sample so many products it had begun to feel genuinely stressful keeping up — she’d buy a product once a week, use it once or twice, then rush to send it back. Then she received a rare warning instead of an outright ban. If she didn’t stop making returns, it said, she’d be unable to make another one going forward. Now, she’s forced to be certain that she actually wants something, she says. “I’m buying things and then keeping them, and if the product isn’t perfect, I just handle that.”
That line “forced to be certain that she actually wants something” is a real tough pill to swallow in our digital consumption age. We love quick access to things so when we are sitting, scrolling on our couch, we would rather hit purchase (with the mindset of: I can just return it later) than make ourselves wait and really consider the purchase.
The way I generally abuse return policies is that I buy something that has been on my wish list for a while and then the wait time between purchase and arrival makes me question whether or not it’s the best place for my money to be spent. Then I take a VERY critical eye (perhaps overly critical trying to justify my return) to the piece and end up telling myself I should return so my money could go elsewhere. It’s really a silly process.
Imagine if we HAD to keep all the pieces we purchase.
I think our purchases are influenced by return policies whether we are very aware of it or not.
There are two places where I see this play out most acutely in my life;
Second-hand shopping has opened my eyes to the way I lean on returning things when I make an impulse purchase. I cannot return a Poshmark purchase that I made when I was emotional. And when I try to reposh it, I almost always lose money. Even on The Real Real, the $13 shipping and $13 return fee gives me pause before I hit buy.
What’s the other side of this coin for me?
The free shipping and promise (not always a guarantee) of speedy shipping COMBINED with the generally low cost of items on Amazon, make it SUPER easy to buy quickly/ evaluate later. The Amazon Influencer program is one of the top paying programs for influencers and they can generate thousands of dollars a month in affiliate links to Amazon products or their Amazon storefront. And, it’s no wonder, it’s easy to buy an item quickly and then decide later to take it to a drop off location for return.
I have written before about how I use online shopping like dressing room- buying multiple sizes to evaluate the one that fits best or even purchasing multiple washes/colors to pick which one is right for us, and I maintain that this is a helpful habit in this world of online shopping. Even if you had a brick and mortar location of a store near you, there is no guarantee that multiple sizes are available. But lifetime bans do shed light on our tendencies to buy now, think later and should give us pause on buying an item with the long-term plan of returning.
Epilogue: I wrote all of this and then stumbled across this piece from Business Insider which expands upon the shopping expectation that we will have free shipping and free returns. The article quotes a survey by partners National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail saying that $816 billion in merchandise will be sent back this year (at our current return rate of 16.5%).
Again, the BI article notes that more and more retailers will be cracking down on returns through strategies like smaller return windows.To quote the piece;
Retailers spent years getting us addicted to online shopping. And now that we’re hooked, they have more leeway to jack up fees for logistics.
Well, damn, with a threat like that, there’s no better time than now for me to move towards thoughtful purchasing.
I had a realization recently that I felt like I needed to bring to Substack tout suite! There has been a lot of negativity lately around trends (hey, me too!) after The Ezra Klein interview with Kyle Chayka. It seems that we came to a collective agreement after these two men informed the wider world that we have no taste because we just copy each other. Again, I was not immune to the feelings this interview brought.
But I was listening to a different podcast (Sustain This!) recently when I came to the realization; I LOVE our current trend era.
To sum it up, the hosts of Sustain This! were talking about organizing our closets to maximize use of our clothes and one host (I’m not sure which one, I can’t tell their voices apart all the time) mentioned at some point their closet was full of trendy pieces.
Y’all; dressing “in-trend” right now are still pretty, darn timeless.
If I had to take my wardrobe forward 20 years, I might cringe at the barrel jeans (still love ‘em) or the oversized blazers. I might roll my eyes at the sheer number of Sambas I own (won’t stop buying them), but so much of my closet remains good looking. How do I know? Because I could find a person in the 70s, 80s, 90s, etc. wearing denim and great button downs. You can imagine that years from now, a trench coat remains a sound investment.
Even this look which skews very OF THIS MOMENT has pieces that withstand the test of time. A solid jacket (check) , straight-leg track pants (might regress into leisure wear but no reason to get rid of it), high-top sneakers (converse designed this in 1920!).
When Y2K styles started to make a comeback I was embarrassed to recall the ultra low-rise jean style or the highly-embellished tops. And if you were to take our modern trends back to 2002 people might call you boring (comparatively) but you would never look downright silly.
I felt it was important to bring some positivity to the conversation and the reminder that even if we are caught shopping in the trend cycle, that’s not a bad thing for our long-term closet.
I would also just very gently ask us all to consider the environmental impact of all the online ordering and returning (I do it too—just trying to get more thoughtful and self aware about it!), as well as the resting place of all the things we return that often (unlike extra sizes in a brick and mortar) cannot be resold. Maybe it’s just taking the extra step of double checking our measurements with a size guide or asking a friend (in a Substack chat!) about whether a particular brand really runs TTS, and maybe we still end up with something too small/big that we need to return, but hey(!) at least we tried!
Is it bad that my first thought was "Hmm... it doesn't seem that hard to get to $15k in SSENSE returns?" 🫣 Agree with Nicole above that we could and should probably all be more cognizant of the environmental impact of our shopping habits. Also, saved the trench outfit on my Pinterest to recreate, love that for an easy casual look!!