| > The clothing company LL Bean dealt with this same sort Clothing retailers and similar have seen this sort of thing a lot, even before online shopping was a significant part of their trade. > Another issue, called ‘wardrobing’ is where a customer buys something to use once and then return A colleague of mine some years ago used to wear designer shirts and such to company social events. At one point he asked me how I afford as much tech as I bought¹ and I referenced his designer clothes² with the notion that we just prioritise our spending differently with most of my clothes being relatively bargain basement stuff³. In response to this he told me that he wore most of it only once, and returned it within a week or two of purchase as unused, so it cost him relatively little. This was not just mail-order catalogue purchases⁴ but physical stores too where he sometimes had to return items to the same real person he'd bought them from and did so repeatedly. This coloured my impression of his trustworthyness considerably - I have no love for the retail industry but that seems rather low. He said a lot of people do it, which I doubted the scale of at the time but maybe I was somewhat naive there⁵. My overly long-winded point being that this has been a thing for decades. The internet just makes it easier, makes learning the tricks to defraud the trade easier, and because open returns policies are often a selling point for an online retailer (for obvious reasons) makes those tricks relevant to a wider gamut of products & price ranges, which might not have had such returns policies in the past. The growth in social media and it's influence on how much we see of others outside of our close circles probably makes a big difference where fashion is concerned too. ---- [1] it turned out part of this was that my salary was larger than his by more than either of us realised, another factor was how much he spent otherwise trying to impress marks when "on the pull" and how often this expensive hobby happened! [2] and his taste for expensive whiskey, but that isn't relevant to this thread! [3] no personal value judgement being made here, I understand what people get psychologically (and sometimes physically!) from improving their outward image, I just have different priorities which doesn't make me more or less right just different [4] internet shopping proper was only just starting to be significant for everyday fashion at the time, assuming what little I know of such shopping is accurate [5] he also pointed out, when I failed to disguise my discomfort in the idea, my habit at the time of downloading TV instead of waiting months/years for it to be broadcast or available to buy on tape/DVD in this country, which I admit was a valid comparison. I know my life has been some points sort of 100% morally clean! |
How is that a valid comparison? You did what you had to do in order to be able to consume media because the media’s owner did not make it available to you in any form due to the geographic location you lived in.
The other person committed fraud and basically stole the “newness” of a seller’s clothes because they could to afford them.
It would only be sort of comparable if you had a reasonable way to pay the media owner for the media, but chose not to because you wanted to save money.