Nothing is safe anymore, you have to constantly be a detective, open everything, hold things up to the light to see if they have stains, smell them to see if they have any kind of odor indicating the item may have been worn, turn shoes upside down to see if the soles look like they’ve been worn, sheesh, a shopping trip can be soooo time consuming and tedious due to the lack of common sense of others. I used to work for one of those BIG box hardware/contractor stores.....I did not work in the store itself, however, the company policy was that you could return anything, ANYTIME for no reason.....this was 15 years ago....contractors would buy chainsaws, etc. use them on a couple of jobs and then return the item, no questions asked and they would get their money back. The thing was it was the same contractors over and over again, upon return of the item the contractor had to leave a business card and sign a receipt...upon auditing it became very apparent that this was a scam....the company did not change the policy but they did warn the contractors in question that the company was on to them, needless to say, the contractors stopped returning things.....
A store I worked at had a return policy that was “dateless”. We would take anything back as long as it had a tag. There was no “return in 30 days” deadline.
We changed the rules and told our customers that the free ride would be over soon. Well, well, we had returns that were 10 years old or more.
These old bags went through their closets and just pulled out everything they ever bought and never wore and brought it back before the policy change kicked in. They walked away with loads of cash.
Our company should have changed the rules and mention it at the time of sale. Instead we lost thousands and thousands of dollars. These returns were marked down to 1.99 and no one wanted them even at that price.