[JCM9]

This is not ideal, but par for the course in the CPG sector. You’d be shocked how much food your local grocery store throws out each week too.

Also the quality of the reporting is very poor and mostly seems intent at just making Amazon look bad. How much do others destroy? It’s a lot. There’s no ability for the reader to understand if this is bad (relatively speaking) or not.

[slownews45]

Newpapers / books etc used to get pulped regularly. Seriously - back when your local newsdealer sold papers the way it worked is you'd tear off the front page of paper and pulp the rest. You'd be credited unsold copies based on the torn off front page. This was national - and daily.

Books used to have print runs, after 2 years or even less, anything excess got pulped (millions of items).

If you work in a western grocery store - the expiration date thing used to be ridiculous (perfectly good food in my view going out door). They wouldn't let workers take it home either because of potential conflicts. Inventory management has improved significantly here though I think (still an issue of course).

Amazon charges enough to cover the costs of the returned products. I've even been asked to throw away items myself (I returned something, they credit me the funds and asked I dispose of the item myself).

[londons_explore]

Grocery stores in the UK have shrinkage rates of 2% or so.

That includes theft, damaged items, and expired/unsellable food.

2% really doesn't sound bad, and I would guess is substantially lower than Amazon sees - especially considering estimates I could find suggest that the vast majority of that 2% is theft.

[oasisbob]

One thing which makes 2% seem much worse for a grocery store is their thin margins.

The gross profit for just about anything at Amazon is going to astronomical compared to just about any food category.

[djbebs]

Amazon's margins are in line with most supermarket chains.

[byandyphillips]

I don't think this is a good argument that just because x industry does this that it's ok another y industry does it to justify it.

[andrewstuart2]

It's important to have the article properly framed, though. If you didn't organize and get rid of (sell or toss) unused things at your place, you're eventually going to end up under piles of garbage nobody wants unless you somehow anticipated all your own needs perfectly.

At some point you buy something you thought you'd need that you didn't. The same goes with businesses trying to sell. The difference from cleaning up your software project is that getting rid of physical product is not just deleting a few lines of code. It has to go somewhere.

[SiempreViernes]

There exists a second hand market online, Amazon just don't want to feed into it.

Probably the scarcity by waste leads to more profits than trying to recycle, as the environmental costs of waste aren't paid by Amazon.

[outside1234]

I don't think he is making that argument -- which is why he prefaced it with "This is not ideal" -- just setting context,

[trynumber9]

Is it a different industry? Any customer-focused retail that readily accepts returns will inevitably have returned items that are difficult to resell.

[jliptzin]

And in that situation the retailer is just throwing away the product for the consumer who returned it; otherwise the consumer would probably have just thrown it away.

[shapefrog]

What if the article is written as follows: "Before Amazon came along, a store of its kind would routinely dispose of 1 million perfectly good products each year. Now thanks to a series of complicated quantum neural artificial inteligence robots, matching an army of bargain hunters with stock destined for landfill an 87% reduction in waste has been achieved this year alone. Thanks Jeff for saving the world, again!"