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Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged

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Re: Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged

#201

Post by gnrlst »

mattl wrote: post #121
SeanLuke wrote: post #87

I was at the Pike Place Market Starbucks in Seattle and picked up a mug special to that shop for my (native Italian) wife. I took it home in DC and found it had a hairline fracture. No problem, I told her, and promptly called the Pike Place Market Starbucks and explained the situation. They immediately mailed me a new one at no cost and apologized. She remarked that this would NEVER have happened in Italy: no shop wo…

Games Workshop, the miniature manufacturer is like this. The few times I've had an issue with something from them -- mostly missing pieces -- they've shipped me a replacement entire kit, usually overnight at no cost to me.

I have to say Games Workshop and Starbucks are two easy examples, and say nothing about the underlying system of trust in a country.

Games Workshop: a piece costs near nothing to them. It's just a piece of plastic. Makes a ton of economic sense to just replace it and keep customers coming back to buy more profitable plastic.

Starbucks: are a huge multinational that operate a sophisticated logistics network so shipping an item out is less than a thousandth of a rounding error in their daily P&L both in terms of money and time.

The real places to call out / praise are small independent shops where a single item purchased (or returned) could swing the daily revenue / profit one way or another.

Re: Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged

#202

Post by oneplane »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #183
baybal2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aluminium metallurgy strikes back. That's why I am very hesitant to use it for mass manufactured goods. ME misses 1 defect showing few months later, and you get n hundred thousand units recall, or worse, the client asking the money back. For a CM it's a complete devastation. Machining is also very uneconomical unless you can contract high volume machining specialist, but that's impossible for most Only the biggest PC…

Could you elaborate on this? I thought Aluminium is relatively easy to manipulate (and that's why it's used a lot)? Why wouldn't one use injection molding?

That would mostly be limited by tolerances, surface finish and specific alloy used.

When you end up with a part that needs a lot of steps and removes a lot of material you need a machine that is more complicated, more expensive and with a lower throughput than a machine that simply stamps parts out of a sheet, or shapes them through a mandrill.

Casting is a whole other deal, you end up with different properties because the way you cast has different requirements than creating the raw stock. If the part or product you want to make can't match with the results of a cast part (more than just surface finish) you simply can't use casting (until some sort or alloy is found that delivers the required properties).

You can obviously use other methods, i.e. metal injection, or sintering, or you could simply make it out of plastic. Or you make multiple simpler parts and interface them together (screws, glue, welds etc). But all of those are fine from the construction perspective, but not fine from the aesthetic perspective, and those are valid requirements as well.

The manufacturing method generally is selected during a 'design for manufacture' phase, and that phase only comes after you have already established some parameters on the look, feel, and other properties of the product.

If you could just make it out of concrete or a single injected piece of plastic and still meet all the requirements, they would probably do just that (as the process is simpler, cheaper, higher volume etc).

Re: Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged

#203

Post by aurizon »

wolfretcrap wrote: post #146
sss111 wrote: post #31

Apple had a lot of trouble with the Indian market back the early 2010s. They had to pull AppleCare+ out of the country because people were abusing it a lot. [†] Same goes for the country's biggest online retailers, both Amazon and Flipkart also switched to a replacement-only policy in India. "Most analysts agree that many many buyers were abusing the company's refund policy. With many buying latest smartphones, and r…

It's not as bad in US and reason is purely economics of fraud. Very large fraction of US population is paid $30 an hour compared to Indian population which makes scamming not worth the trouble I live in India and I've worked in the US I know Indians just have too much time at their hand, so even schemes which take a lot of your time with little payoff are worth it here. And the reason people don't use their time to a…

India has had trouble shaking the socialist mud off it's boots. Back in the late 40's and 50's huge numbers of bureaucratic make-work jobs were created. A thicket of state and local permits and rules have crippled India to this day. There are few large scale Korean Chaebols - instead there is a frenzy of small shops. Now all these bureacrats and small shops are a force to be reckoned with as the rationalize production millions of people would be turfed out of their feather-beds and made to work. Ask any man from India - India will only prosper in the Chinese way if they change.

Re: Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged

#204

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

selectodude wrote: post #190
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this is partly to avoid price arbitrage such as going to buy an iPhone in a cheaper country. There isn't much arbitrage for new Apple products: if anything, iPhones are more expensive in other countries, especially LEDC countries due to import tariffs (e.g. Brazil and India) and VAT. That said, I can understand phone companies, in general, not having worldwide warranties because localized phones will have d…

The price arbitrage is USA -> basically everywhere else on earth.

That still benefits Apple though as it means the profits from the sale is already repatriated - as opposed to being stuck overseas (see: Apple's cash hoard stuck in Dublin or the Netherlands).

Re: Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged

#205

Post by bellyfullofbac »

duxup wrote: post #65
sans-serif wrote: post #19

In my experience Americans sort of take for granted the breadth and depth of consumer protection you enjoy. I'd wager that in an insignificant portion of countries Apple expanded to, they have had to significantly cut back on refunds/warrantees they offer to combat fraud and abuse.

I worked at a chain pizza place growing up that advertised its money back offer if you didn't like your pizza. When they advertised it I just assumed a lot of people would take advantage of it. Our store was one of the busiest in the US for a single store. One guy ... just one guy abused it regularly. Beyond him almost nobody ever took advantage of the offer at all... Easy enough for the store manager to tell that gu…

If I were the manager I'd just say, if the guy calls, let me talk to him, and then tell him "It doesn't seem you really like our pizzas, we don't want to ruin your dinner, so why don't you order somewhere else?".

A better manager would figure out how to keep him as a paying customer...

Re: Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged

#206

Post by drfuchs »

xvolter wrote: post #42
slver wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is societal expectation. Frankly no one wants opened/used products, so you know those will be sold at significant discount, or refurbished, or thrown away. No business accepts that unless they HAVE to.

No one wants used products for "new" prices, but plenty of people would be willing to buy open-box items at discounted prices. It's a huge thing for appliances. In most situations, however, things are simply repackaged and sold as new. Clothing, for example, is commonly returned; then hopefully re-washed before selling again as new. In most situations this applies to electronics as well, although electronics can be d…

In the USA, "simply repackaged and sold as new" is illegal for all products, even if the first purchaser hadn't even opened the box. You have to sell it as "refurbished" or some such.

Re: Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged

#207

Post by hi41 »

I am an Indian. I can attest that a lot indians are extremely corrupt and will abuse the system as as possible for their own benefit. I am so ashamed of being an indian. Indians are the people who don’t put the shopping cart back in its place and just leave it in the parking lot and the rest of the people can’t park their cars. They unload the cart into car and don’t bother that traffic is backing up.

Re: Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged

#208

Post by tedunangst »

ragazzina wrote: post #194
sss111 wrote: post #31

Apple had a lot of trouble with the Indian market back the early 2010s. They had to pull AppleCare+ out of the country because people were abusing it a lot. [†] Same goes for the country's biggest online retailers, both Amazon and Flipkart also switched to a replacement-only policy in India. "Most analysts agree that many many buyers were abusing the company's refund policy. With many buying latest smartphones, and r…

It's really strange to see that on HN when a company is paying only the taxes it legally has to, it's called "business acumen", but when a person is extracting all the value it can from a policy, it's "abusing the policy". I wonder if the same people hold both the opinions.

Seems like reporting a phone as lost without losing it would be the equivalent of lying about income, which is generally recognized as tax fraud, not business acumen.

Re: Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged

#209

Post by kelnos »

ragazzina wrote: post #194
sss111 wrote: post #31

Apple had a lot of trouble with the Indian market back the early 2010s. They had to pull AppleCare+ out of the country because people were abusing it a lot. [†] Same goes for the country's biggest online retailers, both Amazon and Flipkart also switched to a replacement-only policy in India. "Most analysts agree that many many buyers were abusing the company's refund policy. With many buying latest smartphones, and r…

It's really strange to see that on HN when a company is paying only the taxes it legally has to, it's called "business acumen", but when a person is extracting all the value it can from a policy, it's "abusing the policy". I wonder if the same people hold both the opinions.

Not entirely disagreeing with you, but if we want to stop companies from avoiding tax, we should change the tax code.

Apple has gone and done the analog of that; they've changed the returns code.

I don't see anything wrong with what Apple has done here, and if the US decided to tighten up the tax code, I wouldn't see anything wrong with that either.

To your actual point, I think it's about intent and spirit. The holes in the tax code were put there intentionally, to benefit businesses. We may not like it, but that's how it is. Businesses aren't violating the letter or even the spirit of the law when they avail themselves of it.

On the contrary, Apple sets their return policy based on a balance between good customer service and an estimate of how much that customer service will cost them to provide. They likely estimate this cost based on what they think is reasonable customer behavior. In this case they mis-estimated: apparently Indians don't behave within what they consider to be the spirit of that policy.

Another way of looking at it: the US government estimates tax revenue knowing that those loopholes exist, and is fine with the result. There are no budget-related surprises. Apple's estimates for the cost of returns in India was a large underestimation, so they're fixing their problem.

Maybe it's an overreaction to think about this as "returns abuse", but I don't see these two things as being the same.

Re: Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged

#210

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

axaxs wrote: post #189
r-bar wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think #1 is a signal of a failure in the online retail space. As a customer other than reading the (often gamed) reviews on amazon and watching youtube reviewers how do you know what to buy? Buying a bunch of options and returning them starts to look like a legitimate strategy. For some products (for me it tends to be laptops) you really do not know if you like it until you have your hands on the physical product.

I agree. I myself have noticed how bad all reviews have gotten. For example, I bought an S20 FE last year, and it had a horrible touch screen. Almost EVERYONE who bought one said the same thing and complained. I can think of zero 'reviewers' who even mentioned it. I would be supremely angry if it were a $1200 device with no return policy. I don't really know what the solution is. I think a phone rental business could…

Back in the day, this is what electronics shops were used for... go to Circuit City/Best Buy/Your Telephone Company's store and check out the phones.
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