Over the past few years, I've grown so accustomed to seeing "gross" become the new "problematic". Magic words that you sprinkle into headines or comments, in order to trigger credibility from a certain audience that is pre-conditioned to agree when they see that word.
It's been interesting to watch "problematic", a very dry and clinical sounding term, evolve into "gross", a far more openly moralistic declaration. The shift reflects a lot about trends in progressive thought and discourse itself over the past decade.
So much so, that it was actually jarring to discover that the headline actually meant... "gross"! As in, there are references to dead animals, etc in the body text. It's been so long since I've seen the word used in its classic sense, it was surprising!
The one that has always frustrated me is “valid,” which has mutated from a word to acknowledge something’s objective recognition under a well-recognised schema to one that simply signals that it matches the speaker’s viewpoint.
Not that I have any issue with people believing whatever they want to, but using a word associated with objectivity to lend your inherently subjective statement of opinion a false imprimatur of hard truth is certainly disingenuous.
I think what's going on is slightly different and adds value to the conversion - as far as I've seen the speaker is acknowledging an objective truth about something that has historically or otherwise been seen more subjectively. The classic example would probably be people feeling depressed or something and being told that's valid, because often people feel that they shouldn't feel that way. Basically someone saying "hey stop acting like that isn't a true/normal thing because it is".
On the flip side I can definitely see how someone would look at that and say "Well I subjectively don't agree with what you think is objective" - I don't really see a way around that. Ultimately we're all subjects and can't access objectivity directly so all communication is going to be subjective to some extent. One person might think it's "valid" to murder someone if it's legal in their situation, while someone else might think that's never a "valid" option, and both could be correct if one is talking about legality and the other is talking about morality
The visual of determining if something is clean, or just a pile of usable goods going to waste can trigger disgust across the ideological spectrum. Although, I do agree that usage of "problematic" has become annoyingly problematic.
This paragraph from the article is also blatantly untrue in the context of Amazon:
>We can dispense now with a common myth of modern shopping: The stuff you return probably isn’t restocked and sent back out to another hopeful owner
No, that's not really what happens: it's one of the biggest bugbears of third party Amazon sellers that FBA workers are biased towards restocking even damaged or dirty products. It creates problems for third party seller performance metrics and also issues for customers. The seller is blamed when a customer complains about such a damaged product. When possible most professional sellers prefer to process their own returns so that they can discard or repackage items that have been damaged.
Some of the statistics in the article also conflate the situation with apparel, in which huge proportions of likely returns must be factored in, with other categories in which return rates are really quite low. This is something that all sellers will know like the back of their hands because their return rates are in their dashboards and have to be planned for in all business metrics.
Furthermore, at least with Amazon, few items are "destroyed" even when they are slated to be destroyed. They are often resold on pallets to other sellers or directly to customers through Warehouse Deals. This causes problems when, say, items that have been alleged to be counterfeit are slated for "destruction" but instead wind up recirculated through Warehouse Deals or to liquidation sellers.
This paragraph touches on it without going into the full implications:
>This is why it’s difficult to accurately estimate what portion of returned merchandise is discarded, or even how much waste it adds up to, though we do know that billions of pounds of returns are thrown away in the U.S. every year. 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).
Even electronics slated for recycling or destruction often instead are sold to refurbishers. There's less waste than you might think when it's possible for actual junk to be resold as refurbished. The reason why it's not necessarily tracked is that the e-waste processing plant is not going to report to research firms about all the refurbishers that they sell to, even though there are pretty well built up electronics refurbishing certification organizations that promote the practice.
Not all journalists are bad: I've been a source (directly quoted and on background) on topics like this for the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Verge, Bloomberg, and others and have sometimes been pleasantly surprised by the amount of work and thought that the journalist did. Quality of articles has very little to do with the brand of the publication and everything to do with the quality of the individuals involved in writing the article. In this I think she picked mostly good sources and touched on some of the major themes, but a lack of familiarity with the industry undermined her ability to synthesize all the information.
It seems like she kind of came into it with the preconceived notion that returns are bad for the environment, and then assembled a bunch of information that neither fully supported nor fully undermined that preconception.
What's also missing from this article is that free returns are essential for establishing customer trust in ecommerce before purchases are made. People are more confident to make the purchase when they know they can return it. They are just much more circumspect with their money when they can't return it. The cost of processing returns is lower than the cost of liquidation and restocking with new product, so that is why the practice has become particularly more prevalent with online retail.
That's what'd be challenging to measure. It's really an issue in which returns result in maybe 12.5% junk, 12.5% resalable, versus a situation in which maybe 60% of the stuff on the shelf would have to be liquidated because customers were more circumspect with making a purchase in the first place. Stopping returns in the name of the environment could easily have the unintended consequence of resulting in more discarded new products due to lack of customer confidence.
My son worked the returns line at an Amazon facility. I can 100% guarantee that stuff gets restocked and resold - including stuff that shouldn't be resold. My son can look at the packaging on newly delivered purchases from Amazon and tell you before you open it that it's been returned and resold.
Yes, there are split incentive issues here. The worker is incented by FBA's systems to repackage it for return unless the item completely destroyed. The seller is mad because they will get an angry alert from another automated tentacle of Amazon accusing them of selling inauthentic or damaged merchandise once the damaged return is discovered by another customer. The unit is considered by Amazon to have been in the seller's custody the entire time even if the unit has been maltreated by the first customer and by the warehouse worker who repacked it.
Indeed there are many funny things in the Business Services Agreement that may be illegal and unconscionable, and such arguments can only be brought forth in binding arbitration.
> Stopping returns in the name of the environment could easily have the unintended consequence of resulting in more discarded new products due to lack of customer confidence.
At least, until manufacturers compensate by producing less stuff. People consuming less is a good thing for the planet and a bad thing for the way our society is structured.
It's been interesting to watch "problematic", a very dry and clinical sounding term, evolve into "gross", a far more openly moralistic declaration. The shift reflects a lot about trends in progressive thought and discourse itself over the past decade.
So much so, that it was actually jarring to discover that the headline actually meant... "gross"! As in, there are references to dead animals, etc in the body text. It's been so long since I've seen the word used in its classic sense, it was surprising!