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The Unethical but (Mostly) Legal Retail Shopping Tactics of Devil Consumers - SixWise.com

Learn before you return - Charlotte Observer

There's a fine line between protecting your bottom line and punishing your customers.  Best Buy, Target and other retailers are pursuing ways to stop you from being a "Devil Shopper" that costs them money. 

Return Exchange, a company out of California has started allowing retailers to trade information on customers return habits.  Much like a credit score, Return Exchange profiles a consumer and the retailer can then decide to reject a consumer's return.  Much like a credit score, however, the information can often be out of context and misleading.  It also leads to customer favoritism.  

Quoting from the Observer article:

Much like a credit reporting agency or a company that verifies checks, the Return Exchange compiles a "return activity report" of a consumer's return history, then makes a recommendation to the retailer about whether to allow a return.

The history reports have raised the ire of some consumer advocates like the San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, who say the blacklists are catching honest consumers in their net. They say many consumers are unaware there might be limits on how many items they can return throughout the year.

The article goes on to explain that retailers expected to lose $3.5 billion this holiday season due to return fraud and other schemes. 

Stopping some of these "devil shopper" practices makes a lot of sense.  It's just wrong for someone to buy a product, submit a rebate then return it for a refund.  Buying something, returning it and then trying to get the open box price (would stores even allow that?)  But some of the practices they want to stop are completely within the rights of a consumer.  Two of the items mentioned in the SixWise article particularly got my goat:

1) Buying loss leaders and reselling them.  Especially around the holiday season, people will take advantage of the super deals offered at many stores and then resell those products, typically on Ebay.  The stores don't like this as the purpose of selling things at a loss is to get you into the store to buy more things, but that's just tough.  Once you offer to sell something and a customer buys it, you have no say in what they do with it. 

2) Using a store's price-match guarantee with online retailers low prices.  Again, if you offer a price match guarantee and haven't bothered to exclude web only prices, you are obligated to honor that.  Punishing the customer for accepting your offer is unacceptable.

Sadly these policies will come with a price to the retailers.  Back to the Observer:

There can be a backlash. A recent poll of nearly 2,000 Angie's List users found that 64 percent had trouble returning an item without a receipt. About 12 percent said they don't return gifts at all because the process is too big of a hassle. Angie's List is a Web site where consumers share their ratings and reviews on local contractors and companies.

So save your reciept and start being more careful before you buy it in the first place.