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When they were unwrapped, they looked like slippers and train sets and air fryers, but here’s what much of them look like to retailers about now: boomerangs.
With returns, after all, many of those gifts are making their way back to retailers, with an estimated 16.9% of purchases returned in 2024, more than twice the 8.1% rate in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, according to an annual report from the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns, the UPS-owned logistics company.
And while retailers typically have hired seasonal workers only until they stop piping “Jingle Bells” through their stores, these days they also hire up for Q1 for the returns onslaught:
- More than 1 in 3 retailers (34%) hire seasonal staff to help process returns, while 40% hire third-party reverse logistics providers to do so, according to the survey.
- The most popular place they staff up is a tie between their warehouses and headquarters, where 49% dispatch the holiday returns workers, followed by in stores (48%) and call centers (44%).
The report draws on two surveys: The first, in August, was from 2,007 consumers; the second, in September, was from 249 e-commerce and finance executives from US retailers with more than $500 million in annual revenue.
Free fallin’: While free returns might once have been table stakes for e-commerce, that ship (and shipment) has sailed, with 66% of retailers responding that they’d started charging for at least one type of return method in the previous 12 months.
Bracketing, the practice of ordering items in multiple sizes and colors with the intention of returning some, is a return-logistics headache for retailers, and they’d be wise to keep the Advil close:
- 31% of consumers said they occasionally bracket, and 9% said they “always” do.
- The practice is most common among Gen Z, with 37% responding that they occasionally bracket and 14% saying they always do.
Gen Z, in fact, led the pack in all of what the report calls "fraudulent and abusive returns practices,” admitting that in the last 12 months that they’d returned an item they’d worn (50%), returned at item past the return window (46%), or returned a different item than the one they indicated they’d return (41%).