Tablets

It is semi-widely known that selling electronics is not profitable at all, mostly because huge swaths of The Public are technologically illiterate, and as such, either return everything they buy because it "doesn't work" or just become high-maintenance thorns in the retailer's side. Tablets generally can't be resold after they've been returned, so unless the manufacturer has a deal allowing the retailer to return returned tablets, the retailer just has to eat a several-hundred-dollar loss.

Now, somewhere like The Apple Store that's selling their own products can afford to also have tech support and how-to classes- services that are built in to the iPad's high price. Somewhere like Target or Wal-Mart, however, has no post-sale tech support for tablets.

My store falls in the "no support for tablets" category, and people are trying to return them as defective all the time.

The most dramatic example of this is my new best friend Kindle Lady, who has returned no fewer than four Kindles in the past two weeks.

My store sells refurbished Kindles. Kindle Lady ordered four of them for her kids from our website. She of course bought the cheapest model, because she either didn't know there was more than one model of Kindle, or didn't read any of the product descriptions.

She got sent original-model Kindles, and came into the store all flustered because she wanted "the ones with the cameras on them."

"Ok," we said. "That's the Kindle Fire HD, and costs more money."

"That's fine. Oh, and these two won't hold a charge." It didn't matter that she said they were broken because she was returning them anyway, so we did the swap and ordered two Kindle Fire HDs to be sent to her house.

She came back in a week.

"THEY SENT ME ANOTHER BROKEN TABLET," she said. "IT WON'T CHARGE AT ALL." At this point, I'm wondering whether she's just handing them off to her kids and assuming they don't work when the kids can't figure them out. So after doing her exchange- corporate gave her a $20 off coupon for her "trouble"- I plugged in the Kindle.

It powered on and prompted me to set up an account. So, she was telling the truth that she / her kid couldn't get it to turn on, but the issue was simply that the battery was dead and she hadn't let it charge enough.

Luckily, my store only sells used tablets, so the functional ones she returned can just be repackaged and resold. If we'd been selling them new, however, the company would have either lost several hundred dollars outright because this woman didn't know anything about Kindles, or simply denied all her returns, resulting in an angry customer trolling the internet about how terrible we are, which she's probably doing anyway, because we totally ruined Christmas. 

Short version: I hate selling consumer electronics.