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Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses

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Re: Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses

#31

Post by outside1234 »

byandyphillips wrote: post #28
JCM9 wrote: post #20

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.

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.

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

Re: Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses

#32

Post by trynumber9 »

byandyphillips wrote: post #28
JCM9 wrote: post #20

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.

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.

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

Re: Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses

#33

Post by NKosmatos »

Ok, I can understand that this is how capitalism and consumerism work, it's a lot cheaper just to trash the item and manufacture a new one instead of to check returns, but why don't they donate them to schools, communities, churches (or even better gift them to low paying amazon warehouse workers)??? Out of ~130k items per week they only donated ~30k items.

Re: Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses

#34

Post by jschwartzi »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #27

The report would be a lot more useful if there were some context for this data. How many items do comparable places like Wal Mart warehouses destroy each week? What's the reason for these items being marked for destruction? What percentage of the products are these; how many items go through the warehouse per week that are not destroyed? I expect these are products returned with defects, that have been issued recalls…

No Amazon definitely destroys most returns. I was informed that anything you can take to a Kohl’s is destroyed after return. That’s why sometimes it’s not available as an option.

Re: Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses

#35

Post by andrewstuart2 »

byandyphillips wrote: post #28
JCM9 wrote: post #20

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.

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.

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.

Re: Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses

#36

Post by jliptzin »

trynumber9 wrote: post #32
byandyphillips wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses

#37

Post by soheil »

I'm not sure if this is missed or brushed aside on purpose in the article. There is a crucial difference between destroying something and burning it to the ground vs removing something from circulation in a product chain and reusing any raw materials left by third party services.

This isn't much different than a product being rejected during manufacturing due to something like failed quality control, etc. If you're going to be outraged by this please apply that outrage consistently starting by studying how manufacturing works and then boycotting basically all factories that make anything.

Re: Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses

#38

Post by londons_explore »

JCM9 wrote: post #20

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.

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.

Re: Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses

#39

Post by [deleted] »

londons_explore wrote: post #29

This is what people should really be angry about, not the 'peeing in bottles' working conditions. This directly results in wasted labour, wasted resources, wasted money, and extra environmental damage. And all because amazon doesn't have any serious competition to force them not to waste those resources.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses

#40

Post by kleiba »

silicon2401 wrote: post #26
ajross wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ALL retailers destroy unsellable inventory. Items can be defective, counterfeit, damaged, under legal injunction like a trade dispute, incorrectly licensed, or just plain unwanted. If you trade in any item anywhere eventually you're going to end up with something in stock you can't sell. I mean, what do we want to happen? These things to sit idle forever in a warehouse taking up space?

Give them away for free. we should incentivize under-production, not over-production. charge more for waste disposal

No producer can predict with absolute accuracy the number of items they are going to sell. If you produce too many items that you don't end up selling, you overspend on production costs. If you produce too few, you cut your revenue. Optimizing the balance between these two extremes is part of running a successful business.
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