Take it back. Now!

In a few days, my fellow Americans will overeat.  Most men will also unbuckle their belts and sit down in front of the television and watch football while having yet another huge slice of pie.

As the day comes to an end, whether or not people sincerely thanked their stars for being alive during the best time ever in human history, quite a few will finalize their plans for the big shopping the following morning.

Black Friday is around the corner.

And then, a few days later, many will head back to the stores to return stuff.  Apparently throughout the year, we return a lot of stuff that we bought:

Returning stuff is an American pastime, a tradition even. The industry-wide consensus is that 8 to 10 percent of all goods bought in the U.S. will be returned. For online sales, the rate is much higher, in the range of 25 to 40 percent. Retailers see their return policies as a way to win loyal customers and undercut the competition. Some e-commerce companies make it so easy to send back used products that it can feel like they're almost begging you to do it.
Returns are far less common in other countries. In Asia and Europe, less than 5 percent of purchases are returned. "It's a very uniquely North American phenomenon," says Charles Johnston, a former executive at Walmart and Home Depot who worked on the returns team. "If you go to Europe and other countries that Walmart is not in, most people don't return. You go to Germany and it's just not an expectation." (The exception is the U.K., which behaves like us.)

Such is life in an age of affluence!

If so much stuff is returned, then, if you are like me, you begin to wonder what happens to all that returned goods.

An entire industry has evolved to deal with this--"reverse logistics":

Logistics giants are vying with each other to make returns as speedy and simple as possible. Last year, for example, FedEx spent $1.4bn to buy GENCO, a specialist in so-called “reverse logistics”.

Head. Spinning.!!!

So, the returned goods, and the unsold stuff, are hot business--in the US and abroad.  Go figure!

The brick-and-mortar stores that are succeeding are in the outlet or overstock side of the business. According to the commercial real-estate and analytics firm CoStar, five of the 10 U.S. retail companies that added the most square footage in the first half of 2016 were so-called value stores: Dollar General, Family Dollar, Dollar Tree, Marshalls, and TJ Maxx. During the Great Recession, customers started doing more of their shopping at dollar stores and outlets, and those habits stuck after the recession ended. Consider that there are now more Nordstrom Rack stores than there are Nordstroms, and Macy's recently launched Macy's Backstage to compete with Nordstrom Rack.

Perhaps like how Hollywood created a channel for straight-to-video, maybe the big retailers now have a straight-to-secondary route.

Now, think about how rapidly e-commerce has grown, and will grow.  This means:

More e-commerce means more returns, as customers buy goods without seeing them, often in several sizes, then send back what they don’t need.

After buying all that stuff, if people don't have space at home?  There is another industry that helps out, for a fee: Self-storage!

This is the American Dream, and the pursuit of happiness?