Tag Archives: Sears

The Rules of Purchase Returns Are Changing

How much of a hassle should it be to return something you purchased? There’s a fine line between the few who massively abuse it, and those of us who need to return something that doesn’t fit, won’t work, turned out to be overpriced, or needs to be exchanged. And retailers are tightening up on all of us.

Over $400 billion of merchandise is returned for a refund in North America each year. That’s a ton of product! Retailers claim that costs them $400 billion in sales, but that’s just not true. Lots of the merchandise is put back on the shelves to sell again, and a part of it goes to the secondary market, to places such as Marshalls or Winners.

Habitual returners are about one percent of customers. But, because of them, all of us are going to pay the price through more hassle to return something. Retailers have been really generous with returns, thinking it’d have a big impact on increased sales. Costco and Sears with their incredibly generous return policies led the way that all retailers matched to some degree or another. That’s going to change to a new way of thinking that returns aren’t going to be a right, but a privilege. That’ll take a lot of re-educating and push-back.

The coming new way will be that you’ll earn the right to return something by how much business you give that store and whether you’re part of their loyalty program. So, they’ll have to track your purchase history, which means you’ll have to give up your privacy rights in order for them to do that.

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember a third-party called Telecheque. If you wanted to pay by cheque, they’d phone in your name and bank info and that company would authorize your payment. For returns, the company is called Retail Equation. Smaller stores or chains will track your purchases and it’ll be this third-party that will decide if you can return something or not.

George Boelcke – Money Tools & Rules book – yourmoneybook.com

Sears, Amazon and Why We Can’t Do Our Own Investing

Ever wonder why retailers aren’t doing so well? Here’s a huge reason for it: Traditional retailers such as Sears, The Bay, Macy’s and the likes take 9 to 13 months to get a new clothing line from concept to production and into their stores to sell. Zella is a company with an extensive line of clothing. They can get an idea to production and into stores inside of two weeks! Two weeks versus a year. Wonder no longer why traditional retailers are fading quickly.

On the upside, Thursday Amazon announced they’d be selling Kenworth appliances online. Yes, Sears does have stuff people want – but now it’ll be online and in the U.S. only for the time being.

That announcement also shows why you and I really can’t do our own investing very well: When Amazon announced they’d be selling Kenworth, the stocks of other appliance retailers and manufacturers dropped by $12.5 billion collectively. From Best Buy to Whirlpool, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and the likes their stocks took a big hit. Now you and I may have figured out in a few days that, instead of Kenworth being gone, they’re now going to be a major player with Amazon behind them, but the Bay and Wall Street computers made the sell moves within a minute…

Speaking of investments, I’m going to make a bold prediction if you remember that I’m not an economist: The Bank of Canada can’t and won’t raise rates again until the U.S. does. The rate increase two weeks ago was based on thinking the U.S. would do one, too and they didn’t. The dollar is now way too high for our exporters and getting the dollar down is the main objective of the Bank of Canada. So they can’t do another increase, even if they wanted to, until the U.S. starts to raise them again.

Bad for savers, good for borrowers to get another reprieve…