Online shopping has never been easier. Why is returning so hard?

In early 2023, Brandi de Jager decided to buy some new shoes. She found the perfect pair: studded platform combat boots in red and black. But then other shoes also caught her eye: more combat boots, but in purple; a brown boot with zips; knee-high riding boots in soft gray leather. She planned to put them all in her cart and then cull it before ordering. But then, knowing that no one would be there to see the huge box arrive — her husband was away on a work trip — she ordered six pairs.

The price tag (nearly $1,000) and the size of the enormous box that arrived a few days later left de Jager feeling appalled, and she ended up really liking only two pairs. This wasn’t necessarily a disaster — she could simply return the others and recoup the costs.

But de Jager, a 48-year-old writer living in Charlotte, has always felt stymied by returns. Her post office is chronically short-staffed, so taking a package there requires at least a 45-minute wait. And she often struggles to muster the level of organization required to fill in the return form online, print out the return slip, tape up the box and drive it somewhere.

She ended up stuffing the unwanted shoes back into their boxes and hiding them in her closet before her husband returned from his trip. More than a year later, she still felt too embarrassed to tell him about it.

Online shopping has grown ever more convenient, while returns remain as inconvenient as ever. More and more people are buying in haste and repenting at leisure, as boxes of unwanted goods pile up in our front halls and the backs of our closets. The result is that a wasteful system becomes more wasteful, and shoppers are left with a pile of imperfect items and crippling shame.

As e-commerce grows, retailers have innovated many new ways of making it easier and quicker to find and buy products: algorithms selling you things you didn’t know you wanted, one-click shopping, fast and cheap shipping. One place they haven’t innovated nearly as much, however, is in what’s called “reverse logistics”: the slow journey backward through the supply chain that begins after you send back the goods you ordered perhaps a little too fast.

The returns process as it exists is incredibly wasteful — Christian Piller, a lecturer at DePaul University’s business school, estimated that 40% of all returns end up in landfill — and overcomplicated. With most retailers, people who want to return something need to print out a return slip, repackage the unwanted item, then take it to a UPS or FedEx store or the post office. These steps can be daunting individually, let alone having to accomplish them all in a brief time window.

De Jager said she can hardly afford to not return items. And yet the process can feel impossible given the daily mental overload everyone is already experiencing. “Life is harrowing enough right now, right?” she said. “Without running the gantlet of hurdles (required to return a package). And you feel like there are just enough hurdles to discourage 90% of the population from returning things.”

De Jager is far from the only person who feels overwhelmed by returns. Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, 42, struggles with the same issue, which for her extends to snail mail in general. “Going to the mailbox and collecting the mail from the mailbox, which is probably going to have a whole bunch of things that I don’t want to deal with, it always feels hard,” she said. “So to me, (returning packages) feels like an extension of that, like, okay, now I have to figure out how I’m mailing this thing.”

“It’s the damn tape,” said Jann Becker, 69. “Packing tape gets stuck to itself when it sees me coming! I know I ought to return something … but physically getting it into the box, taping the box, then having to tape the address label onto the box are often beyond me.”

Rona Hu, 60, is a psychiatrist and a professor at Stanford University. At home, she has a stack of unreturned packages from eight separate companies, some of which (she wasn’t sure exactly how many and was hesitant to check) were past their return deadline. She described her frustrations: companies changing their return policies over time so that you have to relearn the whole process, the difficulty of getting to the post office when she works long hours during the week and the post office is open only on Saturday mornings. “I’m a doctor, so I got through medical school, and yet when I try to return things I feel like a 5-year-old,” she said.

The shame is very real. “I currently have a bag of merchandise purchased at a national department store that’s been in my car since before Christmas,” said Mary Terselic, 73, from Racine, Wis. “I don’t know why I procrastinate about making returns. (Many) times I wait so long that I am too embarrassed to return the items. … Just thinking about that bag of clothing malingering in my car makes me anxious.” She emailed a photo of her unreturned-packages pile, a tipsy stack of boxes she estimates is worth $2,000 in total and includes items that have been there since November.

In the depths of returns angst, it’s easy to feel like this state of affairs must be intentional. “I truly believe that it’s designed to be this way,” said C. Lee Cawley, a personal organizer based in Arlington, Va. “They want to keep your money. The merchandise is not that valuable.”

The problem, at least according to Alan Amling, a professor at the University of Tennessee business school and former vice president at UPS, is more that companies tend not to prioritize reverse logistics for innovation, not a purposeful attempt to rob you of your money and dignity. (“For most retailers, I don’t think there is a conspiracy to make returns difficult,” he said in an email.)

The problem is clearly systemic, not individual — people struggle with this because it’s hard, not because there’s something wrong with them. But there are still things individuals can do to make it easier on themselves. Cawley, who estimates that 80% of her customers struggle with returning packages on time, suggests ordering less online and figuring out your “cut-loss number,” a dollar amount below which you will not bother returning a package. (Another successful returner, Kelly Soter-Gunn, uses what she calls the “Law of Kevin”: If something’s so cheap her brother Kevin would scoff at her for taking the time to return it, she doesn’t bother.) For clients who are truly inundated, Cawley has helped create a “shipping station” in a well-trafficked place to store packages and access packing materials, and she recommends placing large bright stickers on each package as reminders for when it’s due to be returned.

Even with help, however, the trap of easy purchasing and difficult returns remains a bleak constant. Reached in July, de Jager admitted she still hadn’t returned the shoes from last year. “I (intend) to do just that,” she wrote in an email. “Tomorrow. Or Monday. Or this coming Friday, because that’ll be the last chance! Sigh.” No amount of shame or guilt — not even the prospect of having her personal-shopping dirty laundry aired in a national newspaper — was enough to make returning packages easier. “It’s like playing a game where the game developer hates you,” she said. “That’s what living in modern life feels like.”