A few months ago, a men's suit jacket appeared on my doorstep. What I had actually ordered was a pink dress. I emailed the retailer, and thus began a weeks-long back-and-forth involving photos of the jacket, photos of tags, and check-ins with customer-service representatives. For the first time in my online-shopping life, I was facing a truly inconvenient return process. The company, it seemed, was going to great lengths to ensure I wasn't trying to defraud them. After enjoying years of easy and free returns as the norm of online shopping, I was surprised by this experience. But perhaps I shouldn't have been: Retailers, dealing with the high costs of rampant returns since the start of the pandemic, plus a growing problem of return fraud, have begun to issue stricter, sometimes byzantine, return policies and processes over the past few years. You can return that shirt, an e-commerce site might say, but only within a 14-day window, or only for store credit. Yes, you can bring back...
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