timeimmortal

No, really — only about 5% of returned products are actually broken.

Blame it on poor usability or just not reading the frickin’ manual, but it turns out that 95 percent of all returned gadgets actually work despite what customers may say or think. That’s right — of the $13.8 billion worth of returned products in 2007, only 5 percent were because gadgets were truly broken. According to Accenture, 68 percent of all returns work but aren’t meeting customer expectations — or they are simply too confusing to use. The other 26 percent are returned due to straight-up buyer’s remorse (AKA significant other budgetary freak-outs). Accenture executive Terry Steger believes that the complexity of gadgets is to blame here, and not the fickle nature of American consumers who tend to give up on product setup within a few minutes. We believe this ia all actually due to the implicit nature of — ooh, look at that shiny thing over there!

We have become such an ignorant and impatient people. Working in camera retail was sometimes difficult, because too often one would see people coming into the store with more money than brains — they’d load up with a massive, expensive, full-featured camera and a few high-quality lenses…and then use the thing for birthday snapshots, never moving their powerful SLR camera off of its default, JPEG-only “Auto” setting.

More than a few times, I told a customer flat-out that I wouldn’t sell him the product being requested, since it would both be a waste of his money and my time. Funnily, when the customer in question finally did settle on a camera to his liking, he usually kept it, rather than returning it a week later.