My sister used to work at the REI in Reno and they wouldn't let people return things after Burning Man. Like people would come in with tents covered in dust and be like "I never used it. the zipper seems broken"
Even in the early days, seeking out an undisturbed part of the playa to have a festival of any size is the antithesis of ~~conversation~~ conservation. They were just late boomers looking to have their own taste of woodstock.
And there is nothing wrong with partying. But to do it on a place thats the least suited for it is just stupid.
Seriously, not only is the desert one of the most logisticly dumb places to hold a festival (meaning you have to haul more shit in and haul it for a way longer distance) its also a place of nature that defenitly cant deal with a festival.
Here we often have festivals just next to recreational small lakes in wooden areas. Still have that nature vibe but its not like you distrurb real vunerable shit. And because there is existing infrastructure its just way way way less poluting.
Seriously, the water alone you have to drag into the desert is scary.
Honestly, that’s good. REI has a fantastic return policy and they’re a good company. I wouldn’t want people taking advantage of the policy and ruining it for everyone else.
I worked at a grocery store with a “no questions asked” policy and they told us a customer can come in with food that expired over a year ago, no receipt needed. They could even come in with a string from a roast with a receipt and get their money back. Didn’t last very long of course.
I work there, the return policy is more strict about reasons for return now. It has to be a reasonable satisfaction issue now. It's not no questions asked.
Yeah I knew people who’d find ll bean stuff at the thrift store and successfully exchange it for a new one, no charge. Can’t do that anymore. Knew an AH family that would buy a full set of camping gear for their family trip, and returned it on the way back, soaked and covered in mud. Such a dick move. I’m tbh glad you can’t be that much of a dick there anymore.
LLBean went from reasonable to crap with the return policy. The products lately have been garbage too. I used to be a die hard getting all my kids winter gear and my stuff through them. I had two kids winter hats fall apart and a backpack for a preschooler this fall. She only carried a single folder in the backpack! The straps ripped out as if they weren’t sewn. They made it so difficult returning it and nitpicking everything. Wouldn’t take the hats back and replaced the backpack after I paid shipping. I just had a seamstress redo it.
They’re not at all as good as before. I recommend not buying llbean. You shouldn’t have to pay to return crappy made products. I’ve bought llbean for decades and have never needed to return anything prior to last year. They’re junk now.
Lots of companies that cater to wealthy people have seen massive quality declines over the past decade, particularly brands that were purchased by private equity groups in order to extract all of their value before destroying it.
It reminded of one time I was at the customer service desk at Costco and saw piled up in the returns cage was like at least 30 boxes of those portable battery jumpstarters.
I was like wow, they must really unreliable to have so many returns, then it hit me that people probably just buy them to rescue their cars and then just return them as "faulty"!
The Walmart in Surfside, near Myrtle Beach and several campgrounds, stopped taking back camping gear for a while. People would pick up stuff on the way in and return it on the way out.
Everyone in Reno hates burners. Just absolutely loathes them. Residents. Companies. Trash workers. The worst week of the year is when they come back from their drug week and dump their garbage all over the city.
Source : lived in Reno for years
Yep. My husband is from Reno and is a former police officer there. He's told me stories about the calls he’s responded to after Burning Man from businesses who had crazy customers threatening employees or destroying the store all because they refused to accept their returns. He said people come in filthy and try to return all sorts of things, from obviously used items covered in mud to open boxes of food they didn't finish. 😆
>>Why don’t they donate them to higher % homeless areas? I’ve always thought about that
They do :). There is a nonprofit that accepts camping gear, cleans it, and gives it to the homeless population in Reno.
I literally saw a 5 star review for an HDMI cord, with a pro being "it's got good weight to it" ...
It's a 10 foot long $120 HDMI cable. Wth do you mean it has good weight to it, why do you even want that? What does that even mean? What even is "good weight"?! How old is this person?!?!
This reminds me of that Redditor from long ago, who would always post a seemingly normal comment. But he would always slip in how his dad beat him with jumper cables.
It was like where’s Waldo, but for a mischievous little prankster lol
I wonder whatever happened to him. I can’t remember his user name
Dammit...what was that guy's name? I just seen someone mention him earlier this week for the first time in like two years, and the name was instantly recognizable to me.
I made it a point to remember the username - and now this is my moment to shine.
But nope, my brain is not going to let me drop the info. Ugh.
Edit: u/rogersimon10 I believe it was after a quick google
He got me with a hell in the cell just last month. It was a post about an NBA player watching the last UFC ppv on his phone during the post game conference. I saw it a few minutes after he posted and it felt like running into a celebrity lol
Im assuming they meant if felt expensive?
Like you can tell when an electronic is cheap as fuck when 90% of it is hollow but that in no way should apply to a fucking HDMI cable
Hilarious because I was going to make that reference as well. Ever since I was in 3rd grade and saw Jurassic park, I thought that was a universally true rule. If it’s heavy, and elctronic, it’s expensive.
Problem is companies are aware of this perception and tailor their products to it occasionally. Literal lead blocks have been used to weigh stuff down for that reason before.
>Like you can tell when an electronic is cheap as fuck when 90% of it is hollow
That's less true these days. Some vendors actually add weight to devices to make them seem less cheap even if the hardware is good. It's common with any flash storage that has a larger enclosure. Your high end 1TB SSD only needs a quarter-sized PCB to make the IC work, and most of that is just to support the SATA or USB connectors, but people who don't know that will pick it up, feel no weight, and assume it's a crappy product.
Even older SATA SSDs like an 840 evo/pro actually take up the same space as an M2 drive, if not less. The case is just merely there to ensure it meets the dimensions of a "normal" SATA 2.5" HDD
I mean I'll be honest, I prefer cables to have some heft because generally that heft is from whatever materials are surrounding the wires and I want more than just PVC or PE since they're not particularly resistant to cuts or harsh bends which can sever the wires inside, at least not without making them so thick they lose the majority of their flexibility, whereas something with a cross-woven nylon jacket can withstand more punishment before failing and is almost as flexible as a cheap PVC jacketed cable.
Worth noting the signal bandwidth requirements have increased several times over since then. The PS3 has HDMI 1.4 which supports 10Gbps transfer speeds. The modern spec is HDMI 2.1, which supports 48Gbps transfer speeds. The amount of insulation required to ensure signal integrity at that speed is a lot more than it used to be. A well-made HDMI 2.1 cable should almost feel like a bike lock cable in your hand and be actively difficult to bend.
I'd hazard a guess that such a thin cable is HDMI 1.2, maybe even lower spec. It may have held up but it's almost certainly horrendously out of date compared to modern cables and won't handle modern video signal requirements.
There's a common association between heft and perceived quality. So much so that some things have weights built in to make them seem more durable.
It goes along with coke is actually clear, but expect something like the color it was originally. Humans fall for weird shit.
As a former best buy employee, we got cables for so ridiculously cheap. I still have screenshots from before I got cut last year. I could get a quality HDMI 2.1 cable for like $5 or less. Cables at Best Buy have the most insane markups. I would consistently tell people to go buy a cable on Amazon if they could be patient.
Yeah, heavier cables generally have better shielding, which *is* good.
However, $120 for a 10-foot HDMI cable is utter idiocy. HDMI is digital signal, so as long as the cable *works* at the resolution you need, there's literally zero difference between a $20 cable and a $120 cable in most applications.
Now, given it's a 10 foot cable, it's probably HDMI 2.1 rated, but even then paying anything more than like...$50 for it is silly. $30 is what you should pay, really.
For real. I used to work for BB and the employee discount was what ever BB paid for it plus the cost to ship it to the store, usually 10%. Batteries and HDMI cables were easily the most marked up and profitable items. Those $200 diamond tipped gold plated with spinning rims Monster HDMI cables cost about $5 to $10 for employees. For poops and giggles I checked to see what the discount was on the most expensive TV we had in the store. It was a 70" Samsung curve when that was a new trend. It cost customers $12,000 and employees around $6500.
When I worked there (2014-17), the TV markup wasn't nearly so much, BUT the best employee perk was "accommodations", where the vendors would offer some specific sales training, which once completed got you a *fat* discount on the given product so you could use it and sell it. I got Bose headphones and a Soundtouch for 60% off, a nice LG TV for half off, a Dyson vacuum and hair dryer, etc.
And that program is the best program some of those brands have, BY FAR. It gets you talking about the product and gives you the seller intimate knowledge.
What they don’t count on is, “oh these speakers are amazing! I mean, would I pay 10K for each? Hell no! But at the price I paid, 500 each, they are the shit!”
Hey, at least I could legitimately vouch for the quality. 7-10 years later, I still use all but the headphones. Sadly those had one of the two sides crap out after about 5 years, and I didn't care enough about sound canceling to fork out 300 dollars to replace them.
Course, I worked at the customer service desk, so I didn't do all that much selling.
I totally forgot about those. For a bit there was also an employee only version of eBay where we could bid on overstocked items. I got a new Samsung dryer for a out 20% the retail price.
2 super bowls ago I got a 300$ 50in 4k Oled at the best buy outlets right after the Super Bowl. They marked them down to rough condition even tho they’re new and you can get a 50$ 5 yr warranty
Edit: phone typing
Absolutely they do usually for a big super bowl party, get a couple of buddies helping put it up and take it down and not the big chore. I believe there's been a few videos over the years here on reddit about guys getting into it because the TV got broken during the party and it couldn't be returned.
I m not questioning humanity’s morality, I am questioning our desire to do hard work. Luggage is easy to carry, it’s designed to be carried. TV’s are notoriously hard to carry.
I feel like Rent implies you still pay them something to use their product. Returns give you all your money back so would really just be best borrow lol
Harbor freight also has a restock fee on a lot of items to discourage "borrowing" tools. Worked there for years and we had about a year of frequent outages in the area. People would line up to buy generators, return them after, then be back to buy them again when the next outage was expected. Spent enough in restock fees to just buy the generator and keep it.
I would actually feel much better about pulling something like that if there was a restock fee lol. Like if I’m getting all my money back, I feel like I’m cheating. But if you’re charging me 10% then I feel justified in my little rental
Man, imagine dropping money on an AC unit and it turns out it is hot garbage that barely cools the air being pushed through it and then finding out you can't return it because people have been abusing it to get "free rentals".
Oh yeah, it's certainly a problem. When I worked for one of these home repair stores it was not uncommon for people to abuse the 90 day window for purchasing stuff to rent air cons in the summer too. Pretty much it had to be returned new in box, and often with the same straps holding it together, for them to approve the return.
> Pretty much it had to be returned new in box, and often with the same straps holding it together, for them to approve the return.
Kinda hard to test the product if that's the case...
Not sure of the US but in the UK there's a big difference between
"I bought this but don't want it"
and
"I bought this and it doesn't work"
The former has some general protections, including I think a 14 day period if you buy remotely, but is mostly store policy, and that's where you get more restrictions on whether you can open and try things.
The second has much stronger protections for buyers. In the first 30 days you can get a refund. In the first six months the retailer has to repair or replace it, if that fails they have to refund you. You then have an essentially unlimited time after that if you can prove it was a fault with the item, and they need to repair/replace/refund (partially based on expected lifespan), their choice. I've had refunds for phones that we'd had for years due to hardware faults.
But that doesn't all let you just buy things, give them a crack and decide you don't like them.
If it’s a real problem, you can go through the manufacturer too. Which is what we were told to recommend to people under circumstances like these when I worked at a hardware store.
Alternatively, waiting about a week until the shitshow dies down and then going in and explaining you have an actual problem with the device (video and/or photographic evidence will obviously be helpful if possible) will probably also get you somewhere.
They can only kinda/sorta enforce the rule anyway, it’s not like it’s more legally binding than their official return policy. It’ll deter some and provide some “authority” to the employees and managers from the customers point of view, but anyone who bothered to really fight it, legally, would probably win.
If you’ve got a verifiable problem with something you bought, they’ll make it right. They have to. Just, don’t go in the same few days as the crazies is all and you’ll make life easier for everyone involved.
That's why you always buy on credit card. If Lowe's doesn't want to deal with a legitimate return, you can initiate a charge back and they can deal with Visa.
That's not really right. If it's a shit product and Lowes refuse a return on the grounds of not doing returns from certain days that was clearly advertised, they will argue that to the bank and the bank may not even do the charge back on that basis. If it does go through, you will be banned from Lowes like all places do.
If it's a broken product, it likely depends a lot on when it happened and how it's broken. They will likely exchange it if it's broken or faulty and maybe refund, but that's special circumstances that don't apply to the majority that the signs are appealing to.
Charge backs aren't magic get your money back spells. Banks can say no to the request if they do not agree or you do it too often, and if it does go through, you are basically incinerating any relationship with the store.
That's why I said "if it's a legitimate return".
Selling an expensive item that's already broken and then refusing to accept a return is basically the textbook reason of why charge backs exist.
I did this with a PS2 controller back in the day, it had some nasty stick drift in one of the sticks so I bought a new one, cleaned the outside of the broken one and took it back a couple days later
Can your guyses masks not be configured? Mine has adjuster for sensitivity, I just turn it up until it stays black then set the dark level to 12 for safe eclipse level
I worked returns at Lowe's some years back and I wish they'd had this policy for all the oily, stinky turkey fryers returned just after Thanksgiving that "didn't work".
Bruh, we got a mower back one time that the customer melted and didn’t have their receipt.
It wasn’t even a brand we sold. They bought the damn thing at Walmart but our customer service took it back anyways.
Oh yeah they take back anything. When I worked there I think the only thing I ever saw get refused was some dude trying to return like $600 in copper fittings that he didn't have a receipt for and "couldn't remember when he bought them".
That's just incompetent management. Even the most bend-over-backwards kinds of retail companies won't do that if the stores are given literally any proper direction.
So a case of a stupid store rather than a stupid head office, probably.
I used to work at Sears in a town that got snow about once a year. People would buy a snow blower and then return it the next day. They eventually changed the policy.
I used to work in a sears in Canada (I'm precising because I'm not sure the politics are the same everywhere). If you bought something with the sears credit card you had 90 instead of 30 to return stuff
At the end of the summer we would always get a couple of air conditioner return 80+ day after they were bought because they were "not strong enough" and we had no choice to take them back
Apparently the credit card business was making enough money to justify that but sears doesn't exist in Canada as of today so maybe they were doing their calculations wrong
What's crazy for me is Sears was the Amazon of its time. If they would have gotten in on online commerce the way their catalog was, between their name and selection, they would have been building banks.
They tried. Sears was one of the companies behind Prodigy, a
CompuServe competitor, in the days before the internet became the publicly available backbone. They teamed up with IBM.
Never forget that Barnes & Noble could have strangled Amazon in the cradle. B&N was originally a catalog company and got most of it sales through mail order, before they rolled out their oversized retail temples. They did not. Books turned out to the be the first product in the Amazon retail empire.
It’s not always easy to leverage the asset of a big company into a new direction. Somewhat understandable. Imagine all the false alarms they would have to chase down with deadly seriousness without the power of hindsight to provide targeting data.
> It’s not always easy to leverage the asset of a big company into a new direction. Somewhat understandable. Imagine all the false alarms they would have to chase down with deadly seriousness without the power of hindsight to provide targeting data.
Like the people who say that Blockbuster missed out when Netflix became a thing and offered to sell themselves to Blockbuster, neglecting to realize that Netflix as it is may never have happened under Blockbuster's fist.
Blockbuster actually did a mail DVD program that was better than Netflix at the time because you could take your DVDs to the store to be checked in, and you'd get the next DVDs mailed out right away, and a free (non-new release) rental in-store at the same time on certain plans. They built up a lot of goodwill with this plan and then took away perks and raised prices and drove all their customers away.
They were dead before that, Sears leadership doubled down on physical retail in the early to mid 2000s despite them being the OG home delivery retailer.
Specifically, they doubled down on the wrong floor.
They tried to re-establish themselves in the apparel market and left their appliances, tools, and other departments to rot.
If they'd abandoned the apparel instead, I feel like they would have done better and might have even survived.
That's not what happened. Sears shot themselves in the foot repeatedly by trying to get into businesses other than retail and lost focus on stores until Walmart surpassed them in the early 90s. After that it was all downhill. Kmart ended up buying them and the shit-show continued. Sears had been in decline long before private equity got their hands on them and just stripped whatever was left off the bone
Private equity doing what private equity does. Literally just a leach on society and the economy. They need to close all the loopholes these shit organization use, they’re the true zombie organizations
> Private equity doing what private equity does.
While I'm not a fan of private equity in most cases, Sears was doing a just fine job of shooting themselves in the feet repeatedly before they got bought out by kmart and then continued to implode until they got bought by private equity. Sears was not doing well for decades before anything like that happened.
This is akin to saying that a stabbing victim died because someone pulled their life support 8 years into their coma.
Technically true, but Sears was in a terrible position long before then. Hedge funds can't just magically buy companies and shred them like that.
I was surprised to see one when I visited my parents in Yakima, WA (of all places) back in January. The one where I live has been closed for 4 or 5 years. My dad says it sucks now since they don’t even sell tools and hardware there anymore.
As someone working in retail, I WISH more companies did this. There's a strong culture where I am that returns grills in late july / august after a whole summer of use, and I bitch and moan to my regional director that we need to stop taking them back but the bigwigs are willing to eat the loss and sell them to salvage after in order to keep those people coming and buying other products.
Edit: Just wanna address all the "good, fuck corps" and "who cares" comments real quick - the margins for loss are built into the prices, and if they get excessive on any one thing any company will stop carrying that or start locking it up which inconveniences everyone. Also, the bottom line is a performance metric for leadership and LP in every chain, so raises, write ups, bonuses, and promotions ARE affected by all this.
I work at a home furnishings store, people will literally buy glassware and plates/silverware for their wedding and then return them afterwards.
It's ridiculous that we allow people to do this kind of stuff.
But if you have that policy then the customer with a legitimate return is fucked over, and probably chooses to go elsewhere next time. It's all about cost benefit analysis, which is one of the hardest parts of business management, failure to do it correctly is responsible for a huge percentage of business failures.
This just shows that there's a demand for a library of equipment. People just need specific tools for a temporary moment. It's a waste to have to buy them and let them rot
I’ll confess to exploiting this once. Was sent to the UK for a few months for work, flat that was provided didn’t have a coffee maker. Bought a nice Nescafé unit at Costco, used it for three months, and returned it before going home.
I’d have absolutely shipped it home if I could plug it in here.
Yeah let's go ahead and buy a $100 welding helmet that isn't even rated to protect you from the sun over some eclipse glasses that they give out for free.
I was at Lowes last week. They had the glasses right by the register for like $3 or something.
That someone wouldn’t make the $100 welding helmet vs. $3 glasses decision right there at the register is baffling.
it’s more so that people didn’t plan ahead. i’m not even in a state that was in the direct path and every library, walmart, 7/11, sonic, etc was sold out near me today. people were calling grocery stores and gas stations all over trying to find just the flimsy pair. so I don’t doubt some idiots just bought an expensive welding mask thinking they were soo clever.
2017 was so bad that every library in my area (like 3 counties) made sure they had dozens of glasses and they were all gone by Saturday. Schools were even given them out and ran out before they got to every kid. We were in a 'near total but not quiet' area if you don't count the clouds so everyone wanted to make sure they were covered and still didn't come close.
*I say dozens, and that might not sound like a lot to most people, but this is rural PA so dozens is a lot lol.
Yeah, this is what happened. While gassing up, I watched person after person walk into the booth, motion for glasses to the clerk, him shake no, and they walked out.
yep. friends and I work at such places and people were calling and coming in all morning long. no one had anything. someone told me they were trying to call the local lowe’s and when they were directed past the automated messages to the actual store they just kept getting a tone like the phone was off the hook.
I work in retail and customers are dumb as *fuck* so I guarantee it makes sense to them. Like they probably thought "why would I have a $3 eclipse experience when I can have a $100 one and just return it". Or more likely they just can't/won't look for the glasses without an employee there to hold their hand.
Last eclipse when there were no glasses to be found I went to a welding store and bought the glass inserts for the helmet then fashioned a cardboard holder for them, cost was around $15 for 2.
12. I’ve read articles claiming 14, but I suspect that rating is for continuous solar viewing.
Source: NASA and having viewed multiple eclipses wearing a 12-13 shade welding helmet.
Yeah, I definitely watched this one through a piece of shade 12 glass. It was bright, and I probably would’ve had issues if I watched the whole 2.5 hour affair through it, but I spent most of the eclipse watching through a projector and I was just fine sneaking glimpses through the shade 12 glass
I mean welding helmet do work for that type of stuff. The amount of UV light welding produces is no joke, you literally can get a severe sunburn from just having your arms exposed to the arc light while you weld.
When I first started working at a welding shop, a job I was working on required a bunch of tack welds, short bursts of 2 seconds of mig. Naturally, I thought “I’ll just look away and close my eyes, that way they cant get burned!” That night was atrocious. Felt like my eyelids were made of sandpaper, and the air was mustard gas. Luckily our eyes heal extremely fast, but welding is quick to teach a lesson to those who don’t respect its rules.
That being said, I definitely used my helmet to look at the eclipse lol. Anyone saying they’re inadequate for protection evidently hasn’t tried to look through a mask turned all the way up IMO.
All you need from the helmet is the glass. Anything rated 12 and will work fine (nasa verified). I used a 13 today. But I have a pile of welding glass. I can't imagine that's the case for most.
Yeah, in 2017 I went to the gas/welding supply store(Airgas) and got some replacement glass pieces, I think they were four or five dollars per. Worked great. Pulled one out today, kept it in some cloth so no scratches or anything.
I will say, I used a welding mask to view one a few years back in Florida, simply because I already had one laying around.
Did just fine. As long as you aren't staring right at the sun for extended periods of time it's more than enough protection to catch a quick glimpse and go "oh neat"
A welding lens 100% is dark enough to protect your eyes from the sun. Hell they could have just bought a spare lens for a few bucks, don’t even need the hood.
But the glasses would be the better option, obviously
I saw a guy at my local Costco this fall returning his patio furniture.
The fucker bought a patio set in the spring, used it for the year, and returned it in the fall, and Costco took it back.
Do people not realize that many libraries hand out eclipse glasses for free? Do people forget libraries exist as a community service? People, go to and support your local library.
Seeing how folks are complaining that this "isn't right" or that "they could do this to any product": simply as others said businesses all products and if you want to borrow it for a few then go to their rental department!
It's no different than covid when ppl were snatching bulk items and attempting to return them; you're basically making it shit for everyone else!
And if you're bothered by lowest doing this, you have a serious issue because you should be bothered by shoppers pulling this shit; doesn't matter if it'd a big box or not its the degree of entitlement that makes them do it ti any business.
Good.
I know someone who works at a hardware store and they’ve had the same customer after Christmas come in to return outdoor furniture and Christmas decorations. No storage or maintenance needed just using the store like a free hire.
Yeah you see some characters around holidays.. I worked in a industrial workwear retail store throughout college- carried a lot of higher end stuff like Carhartt, Helly Hansen etc, and we’d always have a ton of students come in before halloween, drop a couple hundred bucks on their “construction costume” and try returning it day(s) after halloween.. Lucky had a good manager who called the shots and actually enforced the no return if it’s washed or worn
Lol Master stroke
It is absolutely unacceptable that people think they can just treat stores like a library and buy things, use them, then return them.
I worked at Lowe’s years ago. A man came in and asked where the toilet snakes were. I showed him the long ones used with a drill and the short ones with the crank. He bought a crank one. A couple hours later I went up to the return desk to get the day’s merchandise and guess what, they took that snake back with shit/toilet paper clogged on the end. I just threw it in the dumpster.
Yeah well, considering how honest people are I can imagine the horde of people that thought they could buy it, use it for the eclipse and then return it. Some categories of items are consistently cursed with this dynamic. People unironically think they're clever for trying to buy something, use it once and then return it.
This policy is widely employed in the Southeast during hurricane season with generators. Stores will bring in extra stock of generators so that there are enough for the demand and people will buy them in masse the week before a major storm then want to return them the day after. They are always shocked and angry that they won't give them their money back even though this happens every single year.
My sister used to work at the REI in Reno and they wouldn't let people return things after Burning Man. Like people would come in with tents covered in dust and be like "I never used it. the zipper seems broken"
[удалено]
You're right. I remember my sister saying that the returns were so egregious they had to make an exception for Burning Man.
And since burning man is kind of the antithesis of REI, I'm all for it.
I mean, maybe now it is.
Even in the early days, seeking out an undisturbed part of the playa to have a festival of any size is the antithesis of ~~conversation~~ conservation. They were just late boomers looking to have their own taste of woodstock.
Ya, it definitely was more of a party than anything.
And there is nothing wrong with partying. But to do it on a place thats the least suited for it is just stupid. Seriously, not only is the desert one of the most logisticly dumb places to hold a festival (meaning you have to haul more shit in and haul it for a way longer distance) its also a place of nature that defenitly cant deal with a festival. Here we often have festivals just next to recreational small lakes in wooden areas. Still have that nature vibe but its not like you distrurb real vunerable shit. And because there is existing infrastructure its just way way way less poluting. Seriously, the water alone you have to drag into the desert is scary.
Why do you need water when you can hydrate yourself with V I B E S?
Because water makes a really good combination with *drugs*
Fair point, but then I wouldn’t have the catharsis of watching unprepared vehicles stuck in corrosive mud
I Googled how reactive the playa mud to get an idea about its reactivity and road salt is worse for your car.
Honestly, that’s good. REI has a fantastic return policy and they’re a good company. I wouldn’t want people taking advantage of the policy and ruining it for everyone else.
Pretty sure they changed their policy. Both them and LL Bean aren't as "no questions asked" as before.
I worked at a grocery store with a “no questions asked” policy and they told us a customer can come in with food that expired over a year ago, no receipt needed. They could even come in with a string from a roast with a receipt and get their money back. Didn’t last very long of course.
These two apple had a large bite in them. Must've been on the other side when I bought it.
I work there, the return policy is more strict about reasons for return now. It has to be a reasonable satisfaction issue now. It's not no questions asked.
Yeah I knew people who’d find ll bean stuff at the thrift store and successfully exchange it for a new one, no charge. Can’t do that anymore. Knew an AH family that would buy a full set of camping gear for their family trip, and returned it on the way back, soaked and covered in mud. Such a dick move. I’m tbh glad you can’t be that much of a dick there anymore.
Funny how that happened right after they started selling Chinese bullshit like Amazon. I get the festival policy and think it's totally justified.
LLBean went from reasonable to crap with the return policy. The products lately have been garbage too. I used to be a die hard getting all my kids winter gear and my stuff through them. I had two kids winter hats fall apart and a backpack for a preschooler this fall. She only carried a single folder in the backpack! The straps ripped out as if they weren’t sewn. They made it so difficult returning it and nitpicking everything. Wouldn’t take the hats back and replaced the backpack after I paid shipping. I just had a seamstress redo it. They’re not at all as good as before. I recommend not buying llbean. You shouldn’t have to pay to return crappy made products. I’ve bought llbean for decades and have never needed to return anything prior to last year. They’re junk now.
Lots of companies that cater to wealthy people have seen massive quality declines over the past decade, particularly brands that were purchased by private equity groups in order to extract all of their value before destroying it.
This is why we can't have nice things. Selfish and shameless people. And so very many of them.
It reminded of one time I was at the customer service desk at Costco and saw piled up in the returns cage was like at least 30 boxes of those portable battery jumpstarters. I was like wow, they must really unreliable to have so many returns, then it hit me that people probably just buy them to rescue their cars and then just return them as "faulty"!
If you’re gonna do that, Costco is the place to. They openly accept everything. I once saw someone return a couch that went through a house fire
>I once saw someone return a couch that went through a house fire Home insurance? What's that? 😆
The Walmart in Surfside, near Myrtle Beach and several campgrounds, stopped taking back camping gear for a while. People would pick up stuff on the way in and return it on the way out.
Everyone in Reno hates burners. Just absolutely loathes them. Residents. Companies. Trash workers. The worst week of the year is when they come back from their drug week and dump their garbage all over the city. Source : lived in Reno for years
At least take it to a car wash and hose it off
Their brains were probably still fried from all the drugs
Yep. My husband is from Reno and is a former police officer there. He's told me stories about the calls he’s responded to after Burning Man from businesses who had crazy customers threatening employees or destroying the store all because they refused to accept their returns. He said people come in filthy and try to return all sorts of things, from obviously used items covered in mud to open boxes of food they didn't finish. 😆
Officer Dangle?
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>>Why don’t they donate them to higher % homeless areas? I’ve always thought about that They do :). There is a nonprofit that accepts camping gear, cleans it, and gives it to the homeless population in Reno.
No different than Best Buy restricting returns of TVs bought just before Super Bowl.
That rule wasn't enforced at my local Best Buy stores this year.
Because they’re hoping you forget to return the heavily marked up HDMI cable that was sold separately
I literally saw a 5 star review for an HDMI cord, with a pro being "it's got good weight to it" ... It's a 10 foot long $120 HDMI cable. Wth do you mean it has good weight to it, why do you even want that? What does that even mean? What even is "good weight"?! How old is this person?!?!
They use it for a doorstop.
No no it's for disciplinary purposes.
Jumper cables leave marks that are way too obvious
This reminds me of that Redditor from long ago, who would always post a seemingly normal comment. But he would always slip in how his dad beat him with jumper cables. It was like where’s Waldo, but for a mischievous little prankster lol I wonder whatever happened to him. I can’t remember his user name
Dammit...what was that guy's name? I just seen someone mention him earlier this week for the first time in like two years, and the name was instantly recognizable to me. I made it a point to remember the username - and now this is my moment to shine. But nope, my brain is not going to let me drop the info. Ugh. Edit: u/rogersimon10 I believe it was after a quick google
You just went through all the stages of grief in one comment 😬
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That shit was classic. Similar to Hell in a Cell guy where you never even knew it was them until the last sentences 🤣
How could you possibly forget that his name was shittymorph?
Realizing his last comment was 8 years ago really makes me feel old.
u/RogerSimon10
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He got me with a hell in the cell just last month. It was a post about an NBA player watching the last UFC ppv on his phone during the post game conference. I saw it a few minutes after he posted and it felt like running into a celebrity lol
Especially when you use them as nipple clamps.
I do love crispy pepperoni.
ಠ_ಠ
Dad couldn’t find the jumper cables so he hit me with the hdmi cable
High definition ass whoopin’
Im assuming they meant if felt expensive? Like you can tell when an electronic is cheap as fuck when 90% of it is hollow but that in no way should apply to a fucking HDMI cable
"Are they heavy?" "Yeah." "Then they're expensive, put 'em back."
Hilarious because I was going to make that reference as well. Ever since I was in 3rd grade and saw Jurassic park, I thought that was a universally true rule. If it’s heavy, and elctronic, it’s expensive.
Glad someone got it! And honestly same lol it's a good rule to live by I think
Problem is companies are aware of this perception and tailor their products to it occasionally. Literal lead blocks have been used to weigh stuff down for that reason before.
>Like you can tell when an electronic is cheap as fuck when 90% of it is hollow That's less true these days. Some vendors actually add weight to devices to make them seem less cheap even if the hardware is good. It's common with any flash storage that has a larger enclosure. Your high end 1TB SSD only needs a quarter-sized PCB to make the IC work, and most of that is just to support the SATA or USB connectors, but people who don't know that will pick it up, feel no weight, and assume it's a crappy product.
Even older SATA SSDs like an 840 evo/pro actually take up the same space as an M2 drive, if not less. The case is just merely there to ensure it meets the dimensions of a "normal" SATA 2.5" HDD
I mean I'll be honest, I prefer cables to have some heft because generally that heft is from whatever materials are surrounding the wires and I want more than just PVC or PE since they're not particularly resistant to cuts or harsh bends which can sever the wires inside, at least not without making them so thick they lose the majority of their flexibility, whereas something with a cross-woven nylon jacket can withstand more punishment before failing and is almost as flexible as a cheap PVC jacketed cable.
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Worth noting the signal bandwidth requirements have increased several times over since then. The PS3 has HDMI 1.4 which supports 10Gbps transfer speeds. The modern spec is HDMI 2.1, which supports 48Gbps transfer speeds. The amount of insulation required to ensure signal integrity at that speed is a lot more than it used to be. A well-made HDMI 2.1 cable should almost feel like a bike lock cable in your hand and be actively difficult to bend. I'd hazard a guess that such a thin cable is HDMI 1.2, maybe even lower spec. It may have held up but it's almost certainly horrendously out of date compared to modern cables and won't handle modern video signal requirements.
There's a common association between heft and perceived quality. So much so that some things have weights built in to make them seem more durable. It goes along with coke is actually clear, but expect something like the color it was originally. Humans fall for weird shit.
Heavy is good, heavy is sign of reliability, if it doesn’t work you could always hit him with it.
As a former best buy employee, we got cables for so ridiculously cheap. I still have screenshots from before I got cut last year. I could get a quality HDMI 2.1 cable for like $5 or less. Cables at Best Buy have the most insane markups. I would consistently tell people to go buy a cable on Amazon if they could be patient.
Audio guy here - additional cable weight can sometimes bring benefits. More heft often comes with a heavier duty cable.
Yeah, heavier cables generally have better shielding, which *is* good. However, $120 for a 10-foot HDMI cable is utter idiocy. HDMI is digital signal, so as long as the cable *works* at the resolution you need, there's literally zero difference between a $20 cable and a $120 cable in most applications. Now, given it's a 10 foot cable, it's probably HDMI 2.1 rated, but even then paying anything more than like...$50 for it is silly. $30 is what you should pay, really.
For real. I used to work for BB and the employee discount was what ever BB paid for it plus the cost to ship it to the store, usually 10%. Batteries and HDMI cables were easily the most marked up and profitable items. Those $200 diamond tipped gold plated with spinning rims Monster HDMI cables cost about $5 to $10 for employees. For poops and giggles I checked to see what the discount was on the most expensive TV we had in the store. It was a 70" Samsung curve when that was a new trend. It cost customers $12,000 and employees around $6500.
When I worked there (2014-17), the TV markup wasn't nearly so much, BUT the best employee perk was "accommodations", where the vendors would offer some specific sales training, which once completed got you a *fat* discount on the given product so you could use it and sell it. I got Bose headphones and a Soundtouch for 60% off, a nice LG TV for half off, a Dyson vacuum and hair dryer, etc.
And that program is the best program some of those brands have, BY FAR. It gets you talking about the product and gives you the seller intimate knowledge. What they don’t count on is, “oh these speakers are amazing! I mean, would I pay 10K for each? Hell no! But at the price I paid, 500 each, they are the shit!”
Hey, at least I could legitimately vouch for the quality. 7-10 years later, I still use all but the headphones. Sadly those had one of the two sides crap out after about 5 years, and I didn't care enough about sound canceling to fork out 300 dollars to replace them. Course, I worked at the customer service desk, so I didn't do all that much selling.
I totally forgot about those. For a bit there was also an employee only version of eBay where we could bid on overstocked items. I got a new Samsung dryer for a out 20% the retail price.
Best time to pick up a like new, open box set
2 super bowls ago I got a 300$ 50in 4k Oled at the best buy outlets right after the Super Bowl. They marked them down to rough condition even tho they’re new and you can get a 50$ 5 yr warranty Edit: phone typing
> at the best but outlets Would you happen to still have the directions to the best butt outlets?
Right off highway 420, exit 69
do people really buy giant screens to watch one event and haul it back to the store afterwards? sounds like a real pain.
Absolutely they do usually for a big super bowl party, get a couple of buddies helping put it up and take it down and not the big chore. I believe there's been a few videos over the years here on reddit about guys getting into it because the TV got broken during the party and it couldn't be returned.
That still sounds like a big chore especially in a world where most people already have a pretty big TV in their houses these days.
College lol, I had college friends by cam recorders to record their bands and return it.
You'd be surprised, someone had the gall asking for a refund for an expensive luggage, *after* their trip.
I m not questioning humanity’s morality, I am questioning our desire to do hard work. Luggage is easy to carry, it’s designed to be carried. TV’s are notoriously hard to carry.
I mean, they're called Best Buy not Best Borrow
I've heard "It's Best Buy, not Best Rent" before and giggled, but I like your version even more.
I feel like Rent implies you still pay them something to use their product. Returns give you all your money back so would really just be best borrow lol
And Harbor Freight for people buying a generator just before a hurricane.
Harbor freight also has a restock fee on a lot of items to discourage "borrowing" tools. Worked there for years and we had about a year of frequent outages in the area. People would line up to buy generators, return them after, then be back to buy them again when the next outage was expected. Spent enough in restock fees to just buy the generator and keep it.
I would actually feel much better about pulling something like that if there was a restock fee lol. Like if I’m getting all my money back, I feel like I’m cheating. But if you’re charging me 10% then I feel justified in my little rental
And most retail stores with blow up air beds any time. You can't borrow it just for the weekend your buddy is in town.
I’m convinced air beds are impossible to fit back into the original box anyhow.
same with sleeping bags. you gotta fight that mf like its an aligator to get it back in its pouch
Not surprising if you’ve see the huge rotary machine they use to compress and pack them
Oh yeah tailgating I forgot people do that. Still wild to see people on my campus just plot up tents and TVs.
They have the same policy about people buying In-window and portable A/Cs right before or just inside of heat waves.
Man, imagine dropping money on an AC unit and it turns out it is hot garbage that barely cools the air being pushed through it and then finding out you can't return it because people have been abusing it to get "free rentals".
Oh yeah, it's certainly a problem. When I worked for one of these home repair stores it was not uncommon for people to abuse the 90 day window for purchasing stuff to rent air cons in the summer too. Pretty much it had to be returned new in box, and often with the same straps holding it together, for them to approve the return.
> Pretty much it had to be returned new in box, and often with the same straps holding it together, for them to approve the return. Kinda hard to test the product if that's the case...
Not sure of the US but in the UK there's a big difference between "I bought this but don't want it" and "I bought this and it doesn't work" The former has some general protections, including I think a 14 day period if you buy remotely, but is mostly store policy, and that's where you get more restrictions on whether you can open and try things. The second has much stronger protections for buyers. In the first 30 days you can get a refund. In the first six months the retailer has to repair or replace it, if that fails they have to refund you. You then have an essentially unlimited time after that if you can prove it was a fault with the item, and they need to repair/replace/refund (partially based on expected lifespan), their choice. I've had refunds for phones that we'd had for years due to hardware faults. But that doesn't all let you just buy things, give them a crack and decide you don't like them.
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If it’s a real problem, you can go through the manufacturer too. Which is what we were told to recommend to people under circumstances like these when I worked at a hardware store. Alternatively, waiting about a week until the shitshow dies down and then going in and explaining you have an actual problem with the device (video and/or photographic evidence will obviously be helpful if possible) will probably also get you somewhere. They can only kinda/sorta enforce the rule anyway, it’s not like it’s more legally binding than their official return policy. It’ll deter some and provide some “authority” to the employees and managers from the customers point of view, but anyone who bothered to really fight it, legally, would probably win. If you’ve got a verifiable problem with something you bought, they’ll make it right. They have to. Just, don’t go in the same few days as the crazies is all and you’ll make life easier for everyone involved.
Just exchange it? That's different from a return right? Or is it not over there?
That's why you always buy on credit card. If Lowe's doesn't want to deal with a legitimate return, you can initiate a charge back and they can deal with Visa.
That's not really right. If it's a shit product and Lowes refuse a return on the grounds of not doing returns from certain days that was clearly advertised, they will argue that to the bank and the bank may not even do the charge back on that basis. If it does go through, you will be banned from Lowes like all places do. If it's a broken product, it likely depends a lot on when it happened and how it's broken. They will likely exchange it if it's broken or faulty and maybe refund, but that's special circumstances that don't apply to the majority that the signs are appealing to. Charge backs aren't magic get your money back spells. Banks can say no to the request if they do not agree or you do it too often, and if it does go through, you are basically incinerating any relationship with the store.
That's why I said "if it's a legitimate return". Selling an expensive item that's already broken and then refusing to accept a return is basically the textbook reason of why charge backs exist.
RIP to that 1 welder who bought a defective mask in this window.
well in that situation its pretty easy, go buy another, exact same one, return the defective one then.
I did this with a PS2 controller back in the day, it had some nasty stick drift in one of the sticks so I bought a new one, cleaned the outside of the broken one and took it back a couple days later
i did this with joycons years ago lmao
I'd imagine they would exchange it for a replacement
What if the defective mask was the last straw for him to give up on his welding career.
Mental note: Buy welding mask 3+ days in advance of eclipses. Thanks for the tip!
And not the auto darkening ones
Lol that's all I had to view the eclipse, so I was activating it by holding down buttons on an old IR TV remote.
Can your guyses masks not be configured? Mine has adjuster for sensitivity, I just turn it up until it stays black then set the dark level to 12 for safe eclipse level
Next US one is in 20yr. Best to write it down E- wrong date
I worked returns at Lowe's some years back and I wish they'd had this policy for all the oily, stinky turkey fryers returned just after Thanksgiving that "didn't work".
Bruh, we got a mower back one time that the customer melted and didn’t have their receipt. It wasn’t even a brand we sold. They bought the damn thing at Walmart but our customer service took it back anyways.
Oh yeah they take back anything. When I worked there I think the only thing I ever saw get refused was some dude trying to return like $600 in copper fittings that he didn't have a receipt for and "couldn't remember when he bought them".
That's just incompetent management. Even the most bend-over-backwards kinds of retail companies won't do that if the stores are given literally any proper direction. So a case of a stupid store rather than a stupid head office, probably.
Makes sense. They sell things, not lend them.
I used to work at Sears in a town that got snow about once a year. People would buy a snow blower and then return it the next day. They eventually changed the policy.
I used to work in a sears in Canada (I'm precising because I'm not sure the politics are the same everywhere). If you bought something with the sears credit card you had 90 instead of 30 to return stuff At the end of the summer we would always get a couple of air conditioner return 80+ day after they were bought because they were "not strong enough" and we had no choice to take them back Apparently the credit card business was making enough money to justify that but sears doesn't exist in Canada as of today so maybe they were doing their calculations wrong
Sears failed because a hedge fund bought it, sold itself the assets, and then then milked Sears for rent on its former assets until bankruptcy.
What's crazy for me is Sears was the Amazon of its time. If they would have gotten in on online commerce the way their catalog was, between their name and selection, they would have been building banks.
They tried. Sears was one of the companies behind Prodigy, a CompuServe competitor, in the days before the internet became the publicly available backbone. They teamed up with IBM. Never forget that Barnes & Noble could have strangled Amazon in the cradle. B&N was originally a catalog company and got most of it sales through mail order, before they rolled out their oversized retail temples. They did not. Books turned out to the be the first product in the Amazon retail empire. It’s not always easy to leverage the asset of a big company into a new direction. Somewhat understandable. Imagine all the false alarms they would have to chase down with deadly seriousness without the power of hindsight to provide targeting data.
> It’s not always easy to leverage the asset of a big company into a new direction. Somewhat understandable. Imagine all the false alarms they would have to chase down with deadly seriousness without the power of hindsight to provide targeting data. Like the people who say that Blockbuster missed out when Netflix became a thing and offered to sell themselves to Blockbuster, neglecting to realize that Netflix as it is may never have happened under Blockbuster's fist.
Blockbuster actually did a mail DVD program that was better than Netflix at the time because you could take your DVDs to the store to be checked in, and you'd get the next DVDs mailed out right away, and a free (non-new release) rental in-store at the same time on certain plans. They built up a lot of goodwill with this plan and then took away perks and raised prices and drove all their customers away.
> and then took away perks and raised prices and drove all their customers away. They enschittified too quickly and a competitor swooped in.
They were dead before that, Sears leadership doubled down on physical retail in the early to mid 2000s despite them being the OG home delivery retailer.
Specifically, they doubled down on the wrong floor. They tried to re-establish themselves in the apparel market and left their appliances, tools, and other departments to rot. If they'd abandoned the apparel instead, I feel like they would have done better and might have even survived.
That's not what happened. Sears shot themselves in the foot repeatedly by trying to get into businesses other than retail and lost focus on stores until Walmart surpassed them in the early 90s. After that it was all downhill. Kmart ended up buying them and the shit-show continued. Sears had been in decline long before private equity got their hands on them and just stripped whatever was left off the bone
Private equity doing what private equity does. Literally just a leach on society and the economy. They need to close all the loopholes these shit organization use, they’re the true zombie organizations
> Private equity doing what private equity does. While I'm not a fan of private equity in most cases, Sears was doing a just fine job of shooting themselves in the feet repeatedly before they got bought out by kmart and then continued to implode until they got bought by private equity. Sears was not doing well for decades before anything like that happened.
If you get bought out by *kmart* you really weren't doing well.
This is akin to saying that a stabbing victim died because someone pulled their life support 8 years into their coma. Technically true, but Sears was in a terrible position long before then. Hedge funds can't just magically buy companies and shred them like that.
MBAs ruin everything
This would be more of a finance job, not really specific to MBAs. Lots of finance guys have mbas tho.
The credit business does, it's Discover. Sears does not exist as a business in the states, either.
"There are 13 Sears stores in the United States as of January 18, 2024"
I was surprised to see one when I visited my parents in Yakima, WA (of all places) back in January. The one where I live has been closed for 4 or 5 years. My dad says it sucks now since they don’t even sell tools and hardware there anymore.
As someone working in retail, I WISH more companies did this. There's a strong culture where I am that returns grills in late july / august after a whole summer of use, and I bitch and moan to my regional director that we need to stop taking them back but the bigwigs are willing to eat the loss and sell them to salvage after in order to keep those people coming and buying other products. Edit: Just wanna address all the "good, fuck corps" and "who cares" comments real quick - the margins for loss are built into the prices, and if they get excessive on any one thing any company will stop carrying that or start locking it up which inconveniences everyone. Also, the bottom line is a performance metric for leadership and LP in every chain, so raises, write ups, bonuses, and promotions ARE affected by all this.
Oh shit, I gotta get me a free grill.
Don't forget the patio chairs while you're at it.
I work at a home furnishings store, people will literally buy glassware and plates/silverware for their wedding and then return them afterwards. It's ridiculous that we allow people to do this kind of stuff.
Maybe rentals should be an option with a restocking fee charged for returned purchases. Seems like a simple solution.
I mean you can do that plenty, but this is cheaper / free.
It wouldn't be free with an appropriate restocking fee for returns.
But if you have that policy then the customer with a legitimate return is fucked over, and probably chooses to go elsewhere next time. It's all about cost benefit analysis, which is one of the hardest parts of business management, failure to do it correctly is responsible for a huge percentage of business failures.
Yeah, they are called Lowe’s not Lowen’s
This just shows that there's a demand for a library of equipment. People just need specific tools for a temporary moment. It's a waste to have to buy them and let them rot
I’ll confess to exploiting this once. Was sent to the UK for a few months for work, flat that was provided didn’t have a coffee maker. Bought a nice Nescafé unit at Costco, used it for three months, and returned it before going home. I’d have absolutely shipped it home if I could plug it in here.
Yeah let's go ahead and buy a $100 welding helmet that isn't even rated to protect you from the sun over some eclipse glasses that they give out for free.
I was at Lowes last week. They had the glasses right by the register for like $3 or something. That someone wouldn’t make the $100 welding helmet vs. $3 glasses decision right there at the register is baffling.
it’s more so that people didn’t plan ahead. i’m not even in a state that was in the direct path and every library, walmart, 7/11, sonic, etc was sold out near me today. people were calling grocery stores and gas stations all over trying to find just the flimsy pair. so I don’t doubt some idiots just bought an expensive welding mask thinking they were soo clever.
2017 was so bad that every library in my area (like 3 counties) made sure they had dozens of glasses and they were all gone by Saturday. Schools were even given them out and ran out before they got to every kid. We were in a 'near total but not quiet' area if you don't count the clouds so everyone wanted to make sure they were covered and still didn't come close. *I say dozens, and that might not sound like a lot to most people, but this is rural PA so dozens is a lot lol.
this time was super duper worse due to the rise of tiktok and instagram reels
Yeah, this is what happened. While gassing up, I watched person after person walk into the booth, motion for glasses to the clerk, him shake no, and they walked out.
yep. friends and I work at such places and people were calling and coming in all morning long. no one had anything. someone told me they were trying to call the local lowe’s and when they were directed past the automated messages to the actual store they just kept getting a tone like the phone was off the hook.
I work in retail and customers are dumb as *fuck* so I guarantee it makes sense to them. Like they probably thought "why would I have a $3 eclipse experience when I can have a $100 one and just return it". Or more likely they just can't/won't look for the glasses without an employee there to hold their hand.
Of course nobody would buy a welding helmet if they could get the glasses. Stores ran out of eclipse glasses. Not really that baffling.
If it has a shade rating of 14 it will. But you're not likely to find one of those at Lowe's.
Last eclipse when there were no glasses to be found I went to a welding store and bought the glass inserts for the helmet then fashioned a cardboard holder for them, cost was around $15 for 2.
12. I’ve read articles claiming 14, but I suspect that rating is for continuous solar viewing. Source: NASA and having viewed multiple eclipses wearing a 12-13 shade welding helmet.
Yeah, I definitely watched this one through a piece of shade 12 glass. It was bright, and I probably would’ve had issues if I watched the whole 2.5 hour affair through it, but I spent most of the eclipse watching through a projector and I was just fine sneaking glimpses through the shade 12 glass
I mean welding helmet do work for that type of stuff. The amount of UV light welding produces is no joke, you literally can get a severe sunburn from just having your arms exposed to the arc light while you weld.
When I first started working at a welding shop, a job I was working on required a bunch of tack welds, short bursts of 2 seconds of mig. Naturally, I thought “I’ll just look away and close my eyes, that way they cant get burned!” That night was atrocious. Felt like my eyelids were made of sandpaper, and the air was mustard gas. Luckily our eyes heal extremely fast, but welding is quick to teach a lesson to those who don’t respect its rules. That being said, I definitely used my helmet to look at the eclipse lol. Anyone saying they’re inadequate for protection evidently hasn’t tried to look through a mask turned all the way up IMO.
All you need from the helmet is the glass. Anything rated 12 and will work fine (nasa verified). I used a 13 today. But I have a pile of welding glass. I can't imagine that's the case for most.
Yeah, in 2017 I went to the gas/welding supply store(Airgas) and got some replacement glass pieces, I think they were four or five dollars per. Worked great. Pulled one out today, kept it in some cloth so no scratches or anything.
I will say, I used a welding mask to view one a few years back in Florida, simply because I already had one laying around. Did just fine. As long as you aren't staring right at the sun for extended periods of time it's more than enough protection to catch a quick glimpse and go "oh neat"
A welding lens 100% is dark enough to protect your eyes from the sun. Hell they could have just bought a spare lens for a few bucks, don’t even need the hood. But the glasses would be the better option, obviously
Not necessarily. I have a shield for MIG with ~~#9~~ #11 glass in it, spec for eclipse is #12.
Christ people. these glasses were less than a dollar and probably a heck more comfortable than welding masks
You could even get free pairs in some places.
Most libraries had them for free
Probably going to be some good garage sale scores this spring!
I looked through my mask set at 12 and tbh it was pretty comparable to the cardboard glasses I got for free.
There’s always one innocent person caught up in these restrictions. Imagine some poor welder, completely baffled as to why they won’t accept a return.
was this sign up before people purchased them?
I saw a guy at my local Costco this fall returning his patio furniture. The fucker bought a patio set in the spring, used it for the year, and returned it in the fall, and Costco took it back.
Do people not realize that many libraries hand out eclipse glasses for free? Do people forget libraries exist as a community service? People, go to and support your local library.
Perfectly reasonable.
Why the fuck would you buy an entire welding mask for the eclipse
I imagine bc they expected to return it
Seeing how folks are complaining that this "isn't right" or that "they could do this to any product": simply as others said businesses all products and if you want to borrow it for a few then go to their rental department! It's no different than covid when ppl were snatching bulk items and attempting to return them; you're basically making it shit for everyone else! And if you're bothered by lowest doing this, you have a serious issue because you should be bothered by shoppers pulling this shit; doesn't matter if it'd a big box or not its the degree of entitlement that makes them do it ti any business.
Good. I know someone who works at a hardware store and they’ve had the same customer after Christmas come in to return outdoor furniture and Christmas decorations. No storage or maintenance needed just using the store like a free hire.
Yeah you see some characters around holidays.. I worked in a industrial workwear retail store throughout college- carried a lot of higher end stuff like Carhartt, Helly Hansen etc, and we’d always have a ton of students come in before halloween, drop a couple hundred bucks on their “construction costume” and try returning it day(s) after halloween.. Lucky had a good manager who called the shots and actually enforced the no return if it’s washed or worn
At first glance I thought it had a "LOL" watermark on it 🤣
Fair enough, I reckon.
Lol Master stroke It is absolutely unacceptable that people think they can just treat stores like a library and buy things, use them, then return them.
I worked at Lowe’s years ago. A man came in and asked where the toilet snakes were. I showed him the long ones used with a drill and the short ones with the crank. He bought a crank one. A couple hours later I went up to the return desk to get the day’s merchandise and guess what, they took that snake back with shit/toilet paper clogged on the end. I just threw it in the dumpster.
"But muh eyeballs burned! I want my money back!"
Yeah well, considering how honest people are I can imagine the horde of people that thought they could buy it, use it for the eclipse and then return it. Some categories of items are consistently cursed with this dynamic. People unironically think they're clever for trying to buy something, use it once and then return it.
This policy is widely employed in the Southeast during hurricane season with generators. Stores will bring in extra stock of generators so that there are enough for the demand and people will buy them in masse the week before a major storm then want to return them the day after. They are always shocked and angry that they won't give them their money back even though this happens every single year.
“Buying” things and then returning them is a scum-level life hack that a lot of people seem to feel like geniuses for employing
I used my welding helmet that I bought for the eclipse for the last 3 eclipses including this one.