"being in possession of stolen property" Another seller sends in stolen items to the Amazon warehouse with the same SKU as I am selling. Amazon puts them in the same bin. Someone orders from me and they pick the stolen instance out of the bin. Was I in ever in possession of the stolen items? Is there any way I could have performed "due diligence" on those items? We know for a fact that fraudulent items have been laundered like this. Why wouldn't someone apply it to stolen goods?

Amazon provides sellers the option to use FNSKU barcodes, which are unique to the seller, and generally prevent this problem. The scenario you're describing can definitely happen, but using FNSKUs instead of UPCs pretty much prevents it.

Let's understand something about the model: in many cases, the primary cost factors of an item are shipping and marketplace commissions. Think about it: if you produce a t-shirt in Pakistan, you've got to ship it to a US warehouse. From there, it ships to a customer. If they want to return the shirt, it ships a 3rd time. To reclaim any value from the returned shirt... now it'll ship a 4th time.

In reality, "keep the return" is mostly happening in two cases. In the first case, it's inexpensively produced items like my shirt example. The shirt may cost $5.00 to produce and sell for $25.00, but most of that cost is really the shipping and marketplace fees. It doesn't make sense to have the customer return that sort of item.

In the second case, the item is very large. Like a few weeks ago, somebody wanted to return a bumper for a car. The shipping would have been close to $400, which is nearly the purchase price of the bumper. It doesn't really make sense to have the customer return it.

The other driving factor here is Amazon's return policy. People have grown accustomed to this, and if you're selling anywhere online it's what the market expects. The problem has to do with the speed and generosity sellers are compelled to make return decisions. Most companies aren't equipped to make good decisions about returns quickly enough to comply with this policy.

I own a company that does outsourced returns processing for online retailers. That's how I know this. I deal with it every day.

I'm very involved in this situation, and there's more going on here than many realize.

Imagine you're selling laptops on Amazon. You send them to FBA, Amazon ships when they sell, and then cuts you a check. If somebody wants to return a laptop, Amazon takes care of the customer service too, and likely gives a refund (on your behalf... it's your money).

When you log into Seller Central, the dashboard for your Amazon store, you might see you've got 10 "unsellable" laptops, with very generic descriptions about the reason. Like 3 customer damage, 2 defective, 2 warehouse damage, and so on.. Amazon will ask what you want done with your unsellable laptops, and they give you a couple basic options:

Dispose: They will charge you to dispose of the laptops. Then they actually do a more detailed inspection to see what they're worth. From there, your laptops may end up on "Warehouse Deals", they might be added to a liquidation pallet sold to the highest bidder, OR they might be thrown in the trash. I am only speculating

this is what happens, but there is strong evidence to indicate it's very close to reality.

Removal: They will ship your "unsellable" laptops to a US address, and charge a nominal fee.

Here's the dirty secret: In my experience, Amazon's decision a product is "unsellable" is often wrong over 80% of the time. I know this because my company processes "Removals" for people. We often see things like an "unsellable" $600 leather jacket, which Amazon refunded, and guess what's actually in the box? A bottle of whiteout. I'm not joking.

This isn't meant to be a plug, but my company solves this for online sellers, mainly people who sell on Amazon. The return ships to us, and we provide a full inspection within 3 days. It's enough info the seller can determine the value of the item and the honesty of the customer very quickly, so they can make intelligent decisions about this. If the item is still in good condition, we'll ship to the next customer. Otherwise, we help liquidate it or reclaim the value other ways.

Imo, about 10% of returns aren't very honest. Just for instance, we saw the same person buy a large car part "by accident" 3-4 times in the same month a while ago. I'm not really sure how somebody buys a roll bar 4 times by accident...

https://medium.com/@jasonthist... This isn't a new problem, and I have been preaching about it since the old blackcode.com days. Clearly, a different approach is needed.

This is also a common practice in ecommerce retail known as "dropshipping". That's where an online retailer lists inventory they don't actually own, then purchase it and have it shipped when someone buys it. Most often, this happens when the supplier isn't very good at selling the product, or the ecommerce seller is aware of a target market the supplier isn't.

You're absolutely right, it's an extortion issue and the phones are just one aspect of it. Let me explain something.

Many things in prison are "official" on paper but not actually enforced. The guards are supposed to ensure everyone has equal access to the phones, as well as the laundry and everything else. They are supposed to stop extortion and things like that. However, it's kind of an unspoken rule that inmates are supposed to police themselves. The guards typically only get involved when that fails, and then everyone is in trouble. This is where many of these "crews" come from.

This double standard is where a lot of these crews come from. Many of them are malicious and dangerous, while others are more like defacto peacekeepers.

Typical example is the laundry. In the institute where I served my time there were washers and dryers inmates are supposed to have free access to. The inmates all encountered problems with this (in my block). The laundry room was a frequent place of violence and theft, among other things. The guards solved it by banning everyone from doing laundry each time anything happened in there.

Some guys got together and proposed the idea of a laundry crew. The idea was we would all agree to let these 4 guys into the laundry room, and we'd just pay them to do our laundry. It worked pretty well and more or less solved the problem, except for people who couldn't afford it. The guards knew about this, and even though is was totally against the prison's rules, they allowed and encouraged it.

What this does is encourage criminal behavior and thinking, as well as instill a distrust of authority and the law. Is that really the kind of environment we think, as a society, will encourage these people to re-enter society as productive, law abiding citizens?

I'm not sure what you mean. I say crew because they are a group of inmates, who I wouldn't necessarily term a gang in a real sense. Sometimes it's a gang, other times it's just a group of people who have bunks near the phones.

You have a point, letters do work fine for most things. However, the GP is also correct it might take the perspective of someone who has been an inmate to understand this issue. Let me try to elaborate on the real issues surrounding phones in prison.

The phones inmates have access to aren't very useful, and can actually be dangerous. In a typical situation, there may be 4 phones for 400 inmates. They're first-come, first-serve so there is usually a line or crowd around them. Other inmates can and will use things they overhear against you, so it's not safe to discuss anything you wouldn't feel comfortable having written on your shirt. This also means making a call at any specific time or date isn't practical, and calls are frequently cut short by others.

Like everything else in prison, this creates a black market. Groups will camp the phones and sell time-slots and privacy to other inmates. The amounts they charge can be exorbitant, and are far too expensive for an inmate with a regular prison job to afford. Just for example, I knew a guy who liked to call his wife and kids every day. He worked in the prison kitchen making $18 a month, but the phone crew charged him $1/minute to use the phone. He stole food and condiments from the kitchen and sold them to other inmates to pay for his phone use.

Most people who use a smuggled phone in prison aren't using them to commit or plot crimes. It's more often about having privacy communicating with family, friends, etc. I've known a few people who had legitimate businesses on the outside, and used a smuggled phone to continue running their business.

Rather than blocking phones it might make more sense to issue each inmate a phone the prison can monitor. The whole situation around the payphones they provide drives a lot of violence and crime simply because there aren't enough of the phones.

Thanks for the sentiment.

It was a state-run prison. That said, Ohio also has several corporate prisons. While state-run prisons (in Ohio; it's all I can speak to) aren't for profit their operations seem heavily influenced by for-profit prisons.

• The prison would have "outside food" days every couple of months, where inmates could place orders to the restaurant of the month (say KFC or Burger King). The prices were marked up about 50%
• The prison commissary would stock mostly food like what you might find at the convenience store (ramen, sardines, chips, beef sticks) but the prices were all marked up about 25%, even though the prison was buying in much higher bulk than most grocery stores.
• The prison had a list of local stores inmates could buy craft or music supplies from (paint, guitars, whatever) but the prices were much higher than in-store pricing.

That said, there are corporations that act as service providers to both private and government institutions. For example Secure Pak and JPay.

I agree that the phones are a privilege, badly managed in the situation I described. I was only providing some context for other people to understand the issue better.

The fact is most inmates will be released at some point, and some might be your neighbor. Think about that. Do you want someone who has been treated like an animal living next door to you or preparing your food? Wouldn't you rather have the guy who's been educated in better living, learned a skilled trade, and encouraged to seek guidance from his family, friends, and pastor? After all, we're talking about people who mostly offended because they lacked those things in the first place.

If you don't care, just consider the next time you get a letter that isn't addressed to you. If you do anything other than write "return to sender - intended recipient not at this address" and place it back in your mail box you too are a felon and should be put in prison, denied phone access, and treated like an animal. That's what the codified law says anyway.

None of this is cut and dry, and anybody trying to make it look that way is oversimplifying the issue.

I think you're missing something here. A lot of the people incarcerated right now are in prison for non-violent crimes. There are definitely people who've done something terrible and can't be rehabilitated. More of the people incarcerated are in prison because they did something non-violent because they were in a bad situation and made a bad decision.

For example, I knew a guy who was a union construction worker who made very good money for honest work. He got injured at work and the doctor prescribed him opiates for the pain until he could get into surgery. By the time he finally got in to have the problem fixed he was addicted to the pain meds. The doctor stopped the medication. For anyone who isn't aware, once a person is hooked on opiates the withdrawals are worse than the worst flu imaginable.

This guy started seeking illegal opiates. He wasn't doing it to get high. He was doing it so he wasn't too sick to go to work and provide for his wife and 2 kids. Does this guy really need to be in prison for drug possession? Can we really say this guy doesn't need some kind of rehabilitation and we should just kill him?

I realize this is kind of a straw-man argument, but as a society we have to understand our justice system as it exists works like this. There are plenty of people incarcerated who are still valuable humans who made bad decisions for respectable reasons. When we write them all off as the worst 1% we are doing ourselves a disservice.

Years ago I spent some time incarcerated in an Ohio prison (my life's changed since then, I just want to point out I have a certain perspective about this).

Most of the phone use I witnessed or heard about was just so people could make reasonable phone calls to family. Picture this: You've got 6 pay phones in a block housing 500 people, and the phones are only open for about 4 hours a day. It's Thanksgiving and the line to use the phone stays 30 people long. Fights happen over the phones. I have seen someone beaten by another inmate because he was on the phone for too long.

To add insult to injury it cost like $2.50 to make a phone call, and then about $1.00 a minute and the phones would disconnect and drops calls all the time (if I remember the prices correctly).

I've definitely experienced this with older games. I have a lot of older games (say 1995-2005 era) that simply don't work with Windows 10 or don't work well. Most of them work just fine with Wine.

I've seen a lot of people use this for things like AirBnb or opening the door for various kinds of service people.