Auto part store policies. Who makes these stupid decisions?

Less of a loss to shrink items out than sell below cost. You can have shrink & still make your margins. Selling below cost hurts margins. Making your margins with no shrink shows cheating/lying/inventory fudging.
 
I don't know about O'Reilly's, but I had a couple of customers that had a ZERO tolerance policy on any leaking oil. They also had some fancy and expensive containment systems. It was due to potential liability in the event a spill caused environmental damage. CYA for a company to point to a written policy and blame it on individuals, as opposed to institutional recklessness. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury (or Onfficials of the EPA, DEC, etc.), the evidence proves this was an isolated incident."
Was the policy followed to the letter? No, but those places were pretty darn clean. Zero tolerance may be over the top, but they don't want spills.
 
That's nothing compared to what carmakers have dealers do. We literally get a list of parts in our inventory to scrap and they go in the garbage compactor. Brand new OE parts, often hard to find stuff. Vintage Parts Inc buys up a lot of discontinued GM and all kinds of other brands parts, but tons of stuff is destroyed. I completely get why it has to be removed from our inventory and want it to be so I can sell fast moving stuff, but it's too bad we can't just let Jim Bob's junkyard come and get it if GM has no interest in selling it anymore. At least then it might get used instead of being dumped in a landfill.

I worked at Advance for a couple years and we didn't destroy much that anyone would want. The more Podunk store I worked at had a clearance rack with some very old stuff on it. We did end up throwing out some air fresheners and very old wax, but that was it, nothing of real value. The other store I worked at was very new and a hub, we didn't dispose of any inventory there that I can remember.
 
It's not just parts stores. I worked a short stint at Lowe's driving their flat bed to deliver building materials, etc. You should see the stuff Lowe's throws in the compactor...and employees aren't entitled to "rescue" any of it. Brand new expensive grills that may have been missing a part or had cosmetic damage. All sorts of products I watched get destroyed under company policy and procedure.

Another story about when I worked for a big Anheuser-Busch wholesale distributor. I saw a whole bunch of beer get destroyed that was just beyond the freshness date. It could not be offered to employees or anybody else under any circumstance.

I was working there when Budweiser (as a primary sponsor) and Dale Earnhardt Jr. parted ways. The amount of Dale Jr/Budweiser merchandise...engraved mirrors, neon signs, posters, standup cutouts, shirts, hats, etc, etc...all thrown in the dumpster. We DID however get to snatch up some of that stuff. Some of it could be worth some coin to a collector one day.
 
Lawyers and insurance companies. Safer and less headaches for the companies to just throw it away rather than risk some kind of potential legal action..The new world we live in.
 
So the consistent answers are combinations of lawyers, EPA, and insurance companies. Boils down to liability.

Sounds about right. I've never needed a lawyer, and never had one against me (never even been to court), but words cannot describe how much I despise our legal system. We are WAY to litigious as a society. And we wonder why things are so expensive... All the money is going to lawyers! Sad and pathetic. Let's throw away millions of dollars of product because Karen might find a bad lid, or because it takes up too much space for corporate Kevin, but screw the people willing to pay for it and the millions of people in poverty. Nice.
 
So the consistent answers are combinations of lawyers, EPA, and insurance companies. Boils down to liability.

Sounds about right. I've never needed a lawyer, and never had one against me (never even been to court), but words cannot describe how much I despise our legal system. We are WAY to litigious as a society. And we wonder why things are so expensive... All the money is going to lawyers! Sad and pathetic. Let's throw away millions of dollars of product because Karen might find a bad lid, or because it takes up too much space for corporate Kevin, but screw the people willing to pay for it and the millions of people in poverty. Nice.
I work in the trash business and you wouldnt believe the perfectly good stuff stores throw away.Truly a wasteful society
 
1) Insurance and lawyers come up with policy 1 because it is the American thing to do. You would rather lose a predictable amount of money than lawsuit of any kind.

2) This is likely accounting and fraud prevention. The same reason farmer would dump milk instead of giving them to charity, or grocery store will destroy food that would drive down prices and cause more pricing pressure. Most likely the inventories are charged back to the manufacturer and written off, if you sell it it would be fraud. They would not want it back they would not want it to drive down pricing further so they have to destroy it. It is a capitalist thing to do, not just America.

Seriously, if you think this is bad wait till you see how people destroy usable buildings, energy sources, food, not letting doctors try to treat some tough cases, repair things that could be repaired, all because of potential liability lawsuit and pricing pressure on future products. In a way this is a reflection of how much excess capacity we have these days and how overstaffed our lawyers population are in this nation.
 
I just saw a news video of the disposal of brand new, unopened ventilators that were produced at the beginning of the Covid 19 scare last year. Dumped in a landfill waiting to be covered over. Link below.

Medical equipments may have certain regulation to follow that couldn't classify them as "new" anymore. What if you donate them and they are now problematic? and sue you?

I really wish we could have send them to India with liability waived, that would save a few hundred people at least.
 
My wife was a manager at Lowe's and the opposite was true . Damaged items or returns were deeply discounted just to move them . Even items that were discontinued were marked down to nearly nothing . I got some good deals on Surefire flashlights . $20 apiece ..
 
My wife was a manager at Lowe's and the opposite was true . Damaged items or returns were deeply discounted just to move them . Even items that were discontinued were marked down to nearly nothing .
It all depends on the vendor or supplier of the items. Some will issue Lowes a credit for the item and in those cases, technically that means the vendor owns it again. They don't want the hassle, shipping costs, man hours, etc involved in returning it so they tell Lowes to destroy it. If Lowes sells it or even gives it away, that is fraud or a contract violation at a minimum. In other cases, the vendor may have a no-return policy/agreement. You know the thing you bought that says "Do not return to retailer if pieces are damaged or missing. Contact us." ? Lowes may even have negotiated that arrangement for better prices and in those cases, the item still belongs to Lowes so they can do what they want with stuff - give it away, sell it discounted, throw it away, and so on.

Another thing people need to consider is space and tracking. What store wants to set aside valuable floor or shelf space for this stuff ? Then how long do you keep it ? Who gets to keep track of this ? Call it wasteful, but it's also a waste of their resources to keep things like this.
 
It could be to prevent Fraud. Employees delibertly damaging products in hopes to get free-bees


This ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I worked at Winn Dixie... And a local store Wallace Foods before that. We had what you call "reclaim". Product damaged to be sent back to the warehouse for credit.

Well at Winn Dixie it did start to happen where certain products got tore up on purpose. Certain types of drinks and candies. And yes there was a time where us on night stock crew are and drank some of those items.

My store co manager Darryl got hot one morning and told us all that if that continued... He'd send all of us up the road aka fired if it kept happening. Which was understandable.

Now a kind of funny story here...

Our night shift manager Johnathan told is to deliberately tear up some products to "reclaim" and send back to the warehouse. Because our back room was getting quite full with extra back stock and we had multiple cases of numerous products.

Well... He didn't really specify how much to tear up. And being 20 years old at the time and being perfectly honest... Tearing stuff up was actually kind of fun. Well unbeknownst to all of us working amongst ourselves ( 7 of us) ... No one knew just how much each other was tearing up. At the end of the night I remember seeing grocery carts full going from the break area in the back room out of there and going all the way down the back of the store. IT WAS A LOT of stuff torn up broken etc etc... A WHOLE LOT.

Well Darryl comes in and goes ballistic... Saying all kinds of things that can't be said on here... Calling us overnight workers every horrible bad name you can think of. Telling us that he and the store manager could easily get fired IF we were stupid enough to send all of that "reclaim" back to the warehouse all at the same time. It was understandable and justified what he said. He was right. I bet we tore up 60-75 grocery carts filled with torn up stock. We ended up with like 8-9 pallets 6-7 feet tall filled with "reclaim" to be sent back. And.. many of those banana boxes were filled with only UPCs cut off the product torn up. I would bet if we had not cut off UPCs and downsized what we had torn up... It would have been 12 pallets with torn up "reclaim" to be sent back.

It took us about 4 and a half months sending a couple of boxes back on each truck to get rid of all the "reclaim". And we got 3 grocery trucks a week. That when we sent "reclaim" back on the empty truck.

It was a fun night. But boy we caught hell the next am. And Darryl was right in being so mad. I did try at least apologize to Darryl. I did feel bad about him being put in such a bad situation.

Him and I talked about it years later and we could laugh about it. Though he still called me and the others a number of bad names still. Which I agreed with him on that.
 
Medical equipments may have certain regulation to follow that couldn't classify them as "new" anymore. What if you donate them and they are now problematic? and sue you?

I really wish we could have send them to India with liability waived, that would save a few hundred people at least.


The ventilator story is a unique case. The hospital system I worked for sent their older equipment to organizations that send it to developing countries that are in need. Everything from beds to scanners. I would imagine that if it passed a biomedical inspection then it was good to go.
 
Before getting hurt and having to go on disability I worked for an international general contractor. Sometimes on government jobs if there was excess materials at the end of the job brand new bundles of plywood/2x4's/etc. had to be buried or go into the dumpster. I even heard a story once of them digging a hole and burying a brand new backhoe. True on not I don't know but with the amount of waste in government it wouldn't surprise me.
 
Medical equipments may have certain regulation to follow that couldn't classify them as "new" anymore. What if you donate them and they are now problematic? and sue you?

I really wish we could have send them to India with liability waived, that would save a few hundred people at least.
Yellow journalism article. These devices are not cleared for use by FDA. They have to be exported or destroyed.
 
It could be to prevent Fraud. Employees delibertly damaging products in hopes to get free-bees
Yup. One word: theft.

Reread OP's original post with a plan to steal things in mind and corporate idiocy starts to make sense.
 
My wife was a manager at Lowe's and the opposite was true . Damaged items or returns were deeply discounted just to move them . Even items that were discontinued were marked down to nearly nothing . I got some good deals on Surefire flashlights . $20 apiece ..
The only damaged/repaired items the Lowe's I worked at would sell were appliances. We had a "scratch and dent" aisle in the appliance department. We unboxed all the appliances that were to be delivered and inspected them for damage before loading them.

We would sometimes unbox something with cosmetic damage from shipping. Those appliances would get marked down 5%-20% depending on the severity and location of the damage. You could actually haggle the hand written sticker price with a manager....basically make a reasonable offer and they could accept it and authorize the sell or reject the offer if they thought it was too low. I bought my matching Samsung washer and dryer set this way. These retailed for $700 a piece. I bought the pair for $500. Both had been "repaired" by an authorized Samsung repairman....both had new control boards.

Due to Lowe's 30 day satisfaction guarantee policy, we often would just pick up faulty appliances and replace it with a new one...IF we did the initial delivery and set up. The faulty unit would be brought back to the store and the warranty repair would be determined and repaired at the store and tested. The repaired item would be placed on the scratch and dent aisle with the other stuff. Lots of washers and dryers were done this way...and some refrigerators.

If something like a refrigerator was deemed unrepairable, the service guy would simply cut the power cord...flush with the cabinet rendering it useless...and it would be written off and the manufacturer would issue a credit to the store.
 
It's just the wasteful American life in retail. A product of easy success and plenty of resources so much so that we are very wasteful. It's sad, but these examples are happening by the truckload in every city in America every week. Restaurants, shopping malls, grocery stores, retail outlets, etc. Defects, returns, etc. often go right into the trash compactor or dumpster. A cow was raised in crummy situations, slaughter, cut into pieces, wrapped, and then thrown into a dumpster. It also happens at construction sites. A tree was cut down, chopped into boards, transported several times to the job site, and then thrown in a dumpster. The amount of good lumber and building materials thrown in the dumpster is sickening. I have, many times, "dumpster dove" for nice pieces of brand new dimensional lumber, boxes of hardwood flooring, sections of PVC piping, etc. The waste is sickening.

I do NOT agree with the wastefulness. I understand the policy to destroy it, I think the policy to destroy it deters customers or employees from poking a hole in a bottle, and then asking for it for free. They might also get a 1 for 1 credit if they document it. But if they sell a $30 bottle for $5, they might just lose $25 on the transaction, plus the employee's time in dealing with transferring the product to a new bottle of oil, etc. I don't agree with it and there is a better way. At minimum this should be donated.

Many many years ago I worked in security at a major grocery and dry goods retailer (similar to Walmart in concept). One of our duties was to observe the disposal of this stuff. I frequently watched grocery carts full of returned food, new clothing with tags, pallets of new food pulled from the floors for minor packing defects, food 1 day past expiration, prime meats, dairy, frozen foods, you name it go right into the trash compactor.

Thankfully, in the decades since, MOST environmentally or community based businesses will repurpose or donate what they can. I've volunteered at food banks and truckloads of this stuff that used to go into the garbage is now donated to clothing and food giveaways in the community. Just today, I saw several pickup trucks getting some from the local grocery store - meats, fresh fruits and veggies, etc. near expiration.
 
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