Load-bearing asterisks

The price of having nice things

By now, dear reader, if you’re anywhere as extremely online as I am, you’ve surely seen the shopping cart copypasta. Since its initial spread a couple years ago, it has quietly ensconced itself into the foundational canon of the new right, slotting right next to deportation flights and expansive carceralism.

The cart is civilization

Like many a wholesome chungus in our corner, I too was struck by the simplicity and beauty of the metaphor of the shopping cart, and immediately shared it with my less online (ok, normie) friends. It did not always go over well.

“I don’t agree with that at all,” said Sharon, a highly capable self-governor and dear family friend. “The grocery store pays people to go get the carts and put them away. If I’m in a hurry when I’m with the kids, it doesn’t actually matter if I return my cart or not.”

She had seen the entire copypasta (I wasn’t the first to share it with her), and objected to being called an absolute savage no better than an animal for choosing cart convenience when it suited her. Which, fair enough. As I’ve said, she’s in fact a highly capable self-governor generally fiercely committed to doing the right thing in practice. To her, shopping cart return doesn’t rise to the level of a moral choice.

Again, fair enough. But also again: the copypasta isn’t really directed at her. Fish — this is water. She can’t see the problem because for her, in her corner of the world, it isn’t one.

She’s also slightly literal minded about this sort of thing. The shopping cart meme isn’t actually about shopping carts, per se. It’s about willing and voluntary participation in pro-social norms when defecting not only costs nothing, it actually benefits you. When you really grok the shopping cart meme and absorb its implications, you see it everywhere.

When I’m slaving away in the code mines for my day job, I’ll often have a video playing in a small corner of my screen while I accomplish some tedious task that doesn’t require my consistent attention. It’s a small sin that keeps me from tabbing away into a much greater one, like twitter arguments. It’s important that these videos be interesting without being too engaging, that they can distract me just enough to occupy my attention during a 20-second test run, but not so much that I attend them in favor of my work overall. One of my favorite genres is electronics repair and cleaning videos, such as this one.

You don’t have to watch the video, I’ll summarize. Big box stores with generous return policies will frequently package up any customer return in less than perfect condition (something they can’t immediately put back out on the shelves) in pallets that they sell to resellers and other liquidators. This guy, whose day job is electronics repair, bought a pallet of returned power tools to attempt to patch up and resell. He knows that these returns will include many faulty items, such as when a customer buys a tool that may have passed quality control but dies after a few uses. He has done this before. But even so he is unprepared for how many of these return boxes are outright scams: people who buy a tool, then return totally different, broken tools in the box. The return staff isn’t paid enough to care or argue with customers, and the store policy is to make returns easy. The customer gets a free tool in exchange for some garbage, at the small cost of a piece of their decency and soul. People think that’s a bargain, so it happens a lot.

You can find lots of channels on youtube whose main gig is to buy return pallets and try to flip them for a profit (search for “amazon return pallet” if you’re curious). A running theme to these videos is exactly the same kind of scam: customers buy an expensive product and then return a cheap one in the box. Amazon can’t possibly verify each return is legitimate without massively increasing the cost of their return process, so they partly cover their losses by selling pallets of returned merchandise. They’re heavily discounted from the sticker price of the items inside, but that’s entirely appropriate, given how many are fraudulent. Amazon is very good at its business, and pretty accurate at guessing how much each pallet might actually be worth on average. The resellers don’t typically turn much of a profit.

So Amazon loses money on returns to an ever-growing pool of dishonest actors, and everyone pays slightly more for everything they buy to cover the cost.

Amazon eats the cost at its massive scale and the engine of commerce grinds on. And their policy was never all that generous to begin with — you only have 30 days from purchase, and you have to pay return shipping in some cases. But for other retailers, this kind of fraud was an existential threat to their entire business model. After 30 years of proudly offering an unconditional lifetime return policy on any gear, outdoor retailer REI was forced to retire the program in 2013 due to constant abuse. Here’s a typical response on reddit to the news.

But what was the return policy wearing that night on its way home from the bar?

NumL0k is a proud cart non-returner. It’s not his fault nobody forced him to do the right thing at personal expense. It’s REI’s fault that unscrupulous members returned 10-year-old worn-out hiking boots for a full refund, or stole North Face jackets from other retailers to return to REI for cash. What did REI think would happen?

What they thought would happen — and what did happen, for decades, among its relatively small group of affluent, extremely conscientious clientele — is that co-op members would correctly perceive the implicit asterisk on the return policy. The one that says, yes, technically you could abuse this. But we trust that you won’t. And in return, you will get a fantastic benefit available basically nowhere else. As long as not too many of you fail to heed the asterisk.

Oops.

When people talk about the social decay of the last couple decades, one can’t help but wonder in retrospect how the high-trust features of the before times went on as long as they did. There was never any real risk of jail time for shoplifting in most cities. The government was never going to come after you for collecting unemployment while working a second job for cash. Nobody would make you return your shopping cart.

True, some people are truly too stupid to connect the dots, especially once you bring in abstractions like insurance, which is magic sky money capable of making stores looted or burned during the Summer of George whole again at no cost to you. But most people get the basic cause and effect here — when other people defect from the social contract, you pay: you pay more at stores to cover fraudulent returns; you pay more in taxes to cover unemployment abuse; you lose time and energy chasing down a cart that wasn’t returned.

But will they return the cart? And will they understand why so much depends on it?