When Amazon struck a deal to turn its brick-and-mortar stores into Amazon return hubs, it was supposed to be a win-win: Easy returns would make customers happy and bring more traffic to struggling retailers. But store workers say the “Amazon vibes” have become a workplace headache, wasting staff time without adding revenue and creating long lines, frustration, and piles of boxes and plastic waste. Some UPS Stores and Kohl’s locations have had to assign extra staff just to keep up with the workload.
“Amazon takes up about a tenth of our profits, but it takes up about 90 percent of our day,” said Jeremy Walker, a UPS store clerk near Dallas who handles 300 to 600 returns a day.
Mr. Walker said those retail workers, the de facto face of Amazon, receive the most customer complaints despite having no direct contact with the company. But what ultimately prompted Mr. Walker to start looking for a new job was an escape from mindless spending.
“What bothers me is what to do with all the returned plastic products,” he said.
The allure of free returns is a big part of what draws consumers to online shopping. The UPS Store has long accepted returns for Amazon products, and Whole Foods also offers free returns. I started taking Amazon bought it shortly after in 2017, followed by Kohl’s in 2018 and Staples last year. These deals with retailers whose businesses have been decimated by the rise of e-commerce have made returns even easier: Americans will return $247 billion worth of goods online by 2023, according to the National Retail Federation.
Last year, some UPS stores began charging about $1 for each package they handle, but Staples and Kohl’s stores are offering it for free in hopes of driving more sales in their stores, store employees said.
But retail workers told The Washington Post that the stress, hours and increased material costs make it a bad idea, especially during busy periods like Prime Day, when millions of Amazon Prime members ordered a record number of products from the site last week.
At Staples, the heavy burden of converting “Amazonians” into Staples customers falls on employees, who hand out store coupons that are expected to generate 15 to 20 percent of sales, two Staples employees told The Post.
Joseph Mobley, a former manager at Staples in Tallahassee, said the company was “counting on it to save the business,” but many shoppers have shifted entirely online.
“There’s a reason they shopped on Amazon and moved online in the first place: They’re not brick-and-mortar shoppers,” he says, “and just because there’s a sale on Charmin toilet paper, marking it down from $21.99 to $18.99, doesn’t mean they’re going to become a Staples shopper.”
UPS Store spokeswoman Casey Sorrell said the company has a “productive relationship” with Amazon but “won’t discuss transactional details.” Kohl’s spokeswoman Jen Johnson said the company values its employees for “creating a great experience” and listens to all feedback.
Maria Boschetti, an Amazon spokeswoman, said Amazon’s “customers value the convenience of being able to return items at our partners, and our partners tell us that running these programs drives business,” adding that the company is working with retailers to prepare for return volumes and staffing. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
“We’re the ones getting yelled at.”
Employees say most “Amazonians” bring one or two items, but some bring more than a dozen, and even as many as 50. Returns are scanned, individually coded, labeled, bagged, boxed and picked up — often customers are returning clothing that they ordered in multiple sizes.
When Staples stores in Florida began accepting Amazon returns last August, Mobley said it was “big business,” with some stores receiving as many as 1,000 returns a week.
A UPS store in Texas had to add two employees to handle Amazon returns, and a Staples store in Tallahassee recently allocated eight paid hours a week to Amazon returns.
During the lunch rush at a Kohl’s in Pleasant Hill in July, a steady stream of customers returning Amazon items rode the escalators up to the second floor. Boxes for Amazon returns were lined against the walls of the customer service area; employees said they had previously been stored behind the counter but had to be moved to avoid workers tripping over them.
When a customer arrived at the store with a shopping cart full of clothes to return, an agent at the customer service desk called in backup to deal with the long line. One such customer, Ashley Sydney, was returning a portable air conditioner. She frequently returns Amazon items at Kohl’s and said she likes how quickly she gets her money back. “Usually it’s in my account before I even get to the door,” she said.
In theory, it would be easy to take your Amazon returns to these third-party retailers.
“In an ideal world, if you have the QR code ready, the scanner working properly and the necessary supplies on hand, it would take five minutes,” says Mobley, the former Staples store manager in Florida, “but the world isn’t perfect, and sometimes people’s phones don’t work and they don’t know what a QR code is, so they call for help, which lengthens the process.”
Often times, customers haven’t even started the return process by the time they get to the front of the line. Multiple times a day, customers arrive with inadequate instructions, don’t know how to navigate the app, or choose the wrong location.
Amazon is increasingly eliminating the need for customers to bring in their own boxes for returns, meaning shoppers’ unwanted purchases are on full display, giving retail employees a unique window into their e-commerce habits.
A UPS store in Virginia once returned nine chairs to a customer who was comparing them for use in a medical waiting room, according to a store employee who asked not to be identified to protect her job. Customers at the store also returned bicycles, televisions and mattresses, the employee said.
At Staples, Mobley said, employees are often required to handle the phone, the cash register and sales on the floor at the same time, “but if someone comes in with an Amazon return, you have to stop and take care of them.” And if they don’t convert enough Amazon return coupons into sales, “you could be fired,” said a Georgia-based Staples employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her job.
Last year, thousands of Staples employees anonymously signed an online petition calling on the company to end its partnership with Amazon. Staples did not respond to questions about its employment practices. Amazon has said its retail partners are responsible for their employees.
Meanwhile, activist investors at publicly traded Kohl’s have been pressuring company executives over its relationship with Amazon since 2021, questioning in financial reports whether its returns program is actually profitable.
In addition to helping Amazon process customer returns, employees at the retail stores also provide customer service for the e-commerce giant, according to employees.
At a Staples in Georgia, a clerk said a customer got into an argument and was chased out of the store after being told he couldn’t return an item because it was too large. At a UPS store in Virginia, where it costs 11 cents to print a return label, a clerk remembered “one guy throwing a tantrum.”
“We’re the ones getting yelled at and ignored,” said Walker, a UPS Store employee in Dallas.
A UPS Store employee in Virginia said that after years of seeing the waste caused by Amazon returns, he started complaining to his wife and kids about the items he ordered online.
“Every time an order came in, someone in the warehouse had to pick it and a driver had to drive it,” he said. “Multiply that by 300 to 400 people in just our store, and you see that across every store across the country. I try not to think about how many work hours are wasted.”
For Walker, a Texas-based UPS worker, the “rampant consumerism” inherent in the rise of “Amazonbi” was highlighted by a returned Adidas shoebox emblazoned with the words, “Together we can end plastic waste.”
“I probably put about 200 to 300 of them in this giant plastic bag,” he said.
